During our Seedy Saturday event, join local gardener Laura Marie Neubert for an introduction to living soil.
Plants eat soil! Not in its material state of course, but indeed once it has been broken down by fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms living symbiotically in the soil, fueled by the sun. Dead soil, also known as dirt, might look like soil, but without living biology to unlock its minerals and plant nutrition (natural fertilizers), dirt does little for plants, and even less for human and planetary health. Industrial-scale conventional farming practices, aggressive tilling, and chemical fertilizers kill soil biology. Food grown in dead soil lacks the capacity to keep us healthy, and over-processing it can do us harm.
The fantastic news is that, while nuanced and complex, soil science is beautifully simple and gardener friendly. Thankfully, for us busy and distracted humans, nature has provided everything we need to keep our soil healthy and also then ourselves.
Spend 30-minutes learning about living soil; maybe even get your hands a bit dirty. Take home the actionable knowledge to not only grow nutrient-dense food in whatever patch of soil you own or borrow, but shop for produce and protein (yes, animals that forage on living soil pass their nutrition up the food chain to us) with confidence.
Event Information
- This is a drop-in event, no registration is required.
- We will be outside under a tent on the Library’s rooftop garden, Swáy̓wi Temíxw. Dress for the weather.
- Check out all the Seedy Saturday activities here.
Laura Marie Neubert is a West Vancouver based Urban Permaculture Designer, writer, photographer, and edu-documentary film-maker. Her Garden To Table column appears regularly in the North Shore News. Following a successful but stressful career in corporate communications, she returned to university, studying permaculture design, silvopasture, forest farming, mushroom cultivation, and other regenerative land use systems at UBC and Cornell. Her goal is to educate and inspire people — by example — to invest time and energy in their health now so that they can avoid investing later in sickness. Laura Marie is married, has three grown children, and when she isn’t working in or writing about her garden, she is cooking, preserving, reading, or working in the community.