List of Workshops

This page outlines ideas for Skill-Sharing workshops and the appropriate season for them, if any.

Italics mark workshop topics that would be useful but we don’t have expertise on that topic as of now (workshop leader). Please feel free in the comment section to express your interest, or contact Gabor with your opinion.

Any time in the year:

• Raising Backyard Chickens: – acquiring, feeding, housing, protecting, propagating and caring for chickens.
• Companion Planting: How to protect your garden from pests, and how to boost productivity by strategically placing different species in relation to each other.
• Permaculture Design: Delving into the guiding principles and life supporting organization Permaculture to design gardens and support lives.
• Eating in season: This workshop could have four segments, one each season. What foods are season appropriate and local, and how to make something delicious about what is then available.
• Peaceful Conflict resolution: Looking at negotiation and how to use it for creting life-supporting peace.
• Nonviolent or Compassionate Communication: A workshop to learn about communicating… No: a way of living, guided by observation, feelings, needs and clear requests.
• Yoghurt Making: How to acquire the bug, and what to do with the milk to end up with fresh yoghurt.
• Preservation With Smoking: What food to smoke, how to build a smoke house, create the smoke, and what wood to use for it. (Workshop doesn’t contain information about non-preservation smoking:-)
• Building a Greenhouse: Selecting a location, determining size, Using different materials, and overviewing the general principles of maintaining and using a greenhouse.
• Energy saving: What is energy, how to measure energy used, how to use less of it, and other creative ideas.
• Ginger Brew: Healthy, refreshing cheap and easy to make.

Spring:

• Spring bicycle tune up: Going through the tasks that anyone can do at home, without much previous preparation or knowledge, but that are essential for a smooth and efficient ride on the bicycle. See previous here.
• Growing mushrooms: A workshop on how to grow mushrooms in your back yard. We will take a fresh log, cut it into appropriate pieces, drill holes into them, inoculate them with spores of Shitakee, Oyster and maybe Hen of the woods mushrooms, using plugs, protect the inoculation from other organisms.
• Building Bamboo Bicycle Trailers: We will harvest appropriate culms/stalks of bamboo, cut them and fasten them with strings. We construct wheel assembly pieces from angle iron to mount two bicycle wheels on this platform(if you want a trailer, provide the wheels!), make a hitch by doing some welding, fit the hitch arm and test the trailer.
• Using Solar energy: How to heat, cook and dehydrate using solar energy. We will look at that by building a simple (or more complex) solar dryer out of wood and glass.
• Planting a Garden: With or without using a greenhouse, from seeds or from plantlings, soil types and preparation, location watering.

Summer:

• Elderflower Syrup Making: This delicious drink was most of what I drank during the winter days in Hungary. We will pick elder flowers, or discuss how to recognize them and where to pick them, and prepare the mix. Take a batch from the workshop, or make it at home. A strongly seasonal workshop, as the elder flower needs to be in a particular shape to best be used.
• Water Collection and Use: Rainwater, storing water, filtering water, and using different water sources.
• Blackberry Jam making: Picking home-grown berries, and preserving them by making blackberry syrup or jam, and canning it. The method is similar for most berries.
• Fruit-leather how-to: what materials to use and how to dehydrate the mix to gain delicious fruit leather of high variety.
• Wild Edibles, Medicinals: Walk around your back yard, and see what can be eaten and used for healing.

Fall:

• Building a root cellar: ways to store root vegetables
• Food preservation: canning, fermenting and dehydrating food for the winter.
• Preserving Cabbage, Sauerkraut Making: Shredding cabbage, making a cabbage dish and can the results, prepare the shreedded cabbage for dehydrating, and fermenting.
• Apple Cider Making: We will crush and press apples, and go through the basics and tools of fermentation.
• Nuts!: Gathering and processing chestnuts, acorn (oak-nuts), butternuts, and other local types.
• Preserving Autumn Olives: Gather them, and process them: the hows of this local resource.
• Soup making and preservation: We will gather all the not otherwise used vegetables from our gardens, cook it up to a delicious soup and preserve it by using canning. Food safety for non-acidic food will also be discussed.
• Corn preservation: Raw corn is healthy and delicious, but seasonal. How to prepare and preserve corn in large amounts from the best local sources is the subject and practice of this workshop.

Winter:

• Inclement Weather Bicycling: What to have, what to wear, how to be visible, and how to plan.
• How to protect your house: We experience more and more unwanted entries into our homes. This workshop would examine ways to avoid unwanted attention, and discourage break-ins.
• Emotional preparation: How to prepare ourselves for changing times and deal emotionally with emerging economic and environmental issues. How to use the gained stability to enrich our lives through physical action too.
• Growing Resilient/Growing Resilience:An inside activity: playing the board game with this name. the game which aims to deal with life-situations emerging from unsustainable living, using community instead of competition.
• Sprouting at Home: What dishes to use, what seeds to sprout, how to care for the sprouts and store them, and how to prepare for eating. This workshop could be any time, but sprouts are the most useful in the winter
• Tool Sharpening and Maintenance: How store and how to prepare your garden and outdoor tools for the next season. Workshop may contain some welding if there are tools with broken metal parts.