Far from being rare or exceptional, mutualistic relationships really are everywhere. Plants could not survive without fungal partners. Animals cannot function without microbial ones. As Lynn Margulis famously and regularly complex life did not arise solely through struggle, but through symbiosis: through mergers, alliances, and long negotiations between once-independent beings. Read more

Adam Alexander has spent many years searching out communities that have still conserved their rare, endangered garden crops. His travels have taken him all over the world, from Albanian villages to Ethiopian farmer collectives, and he’s written two books on his research and the importance of locally-adapted, community-sovereign seeds; The Seed Detective and The Accidental Seed Heroes. In his own garden he experiments with his own landrace varieties, and he’s currently growing heritage Syrian vegetable seed to be returned to the Middle East as part of a programme to revive traditional horticulture. Whether with newly developed strains or old, long-stewarded, “undiscovered” varieties, we should do everything we can to bring diverse and locally adapted fruits, vegetables, and grains to our diets and our landscapes. Join us for this otherGardens gathering as Adam shares his experience with some of these seeds! Read more

This Circle, we’ll spend time with commensalism: its subtlety, its ethical tension, and its questionable reality. Unlike mutualism, commensalism does not ask us to cooperate. Unlike parasitism, it allows us avoid direct exploitation. It allows us to pass through, to take up space lightly or invisibly, to benefit without being asked to give back – at least for a time, at least within the sphere of easy perception. This ambiguity is what makes it worth examining. Read more

Come ready to reflect on your own gifts, connect with neighbors and strangers alike, and leave with seeds — and inspiration — to help cultivate more abundant futures for your family, community, and all generations yet to come. Read more

Our Placedness cycle takes us next to a special aspect of place: Terroir. Terroir is the unique flavor and properties a food or drink develops depending on the unique regional conditions in which it was grown. When we experience or aspire to placedness, in many ways we’re aspiring the deepening of our relationship with cultural and physical terroir. Read more

Understanding how to care for trees is an integral part of developing diverse perennial food systems. Perennial plantings are a powerful approach to reclaiming the essential labor of local food production, because there is the possibility of continuous growth and harvest, without as much input of labor. A few key agroforestry skills for caring for our largest perennial kin are pruning, grafting and coppicing trees. Pruning keeps the tree healthy and encourages fruiting. Grafting allows one to grow a diversity of varieties from one plant, and allows one to trade and forage varieties from various sources. And coppicing allows one to harvest fire (and other forms of) wood without the devastating effects or intensive processing of logging and full tree felling. Read more

Through fresh framing, hands-on collage, guided reflection, and small group conversation, participants will articulate the challenging and creative realities of economic life circa 2026, while imagining oikonmia and visualizing what an economy rooted in care and wellbeing might look like if it were inherent to living in Vermont. Read more

Together, participants will learn to spot transactional patterns in everyday interactions, reflect on how those patterns show up in food systems and community life, and experiment with alternative relational practices — gestures that invite curiosity, reciprocity, and wider, wilder ways of being together. Expect reflective exercises, facilitated dialogue, and hands-on creative exploration in the welcoming, art-centered space of Hard-Pressed. Read more

What might become possible in our communities if we took local imagination as seriously as we take local infrastructure? How might rural places – and the people rooted in them – become catalysts for the kinds of futures we long for but rarely pause to articulate? Join Radically Rural and otherWise for a 90-minute online session with Rob Hopkins, renowned imagination activist, co-founder of the Transition Town movement, and author of How to Fall in Love with the Future. Rob’s work invites us to consider a simple but transformative idea: that vivid, sensory, grounded imaginations of better futures can sharpen our sense of agency right now – especially in times of uncertainty or erosion. Read more

In this workshop, we will come together for a weekend to learn a creative approach to framing a small bespoke wooden structure that will allow us to piece together salvaged windows into a workable greenhouse. Discarded and cracked windows that can no longer serve as working windows in a house due to problems with insulation or even just aesthetics can find new life sheltering our seeds. We will discuss sourcing windows, cleaning them up, and putting them together. Read more