Workshops with Chuck Marsh

The following workshops can be as short as 1.5 or 3-hour workshops or expanded into a half day or full day for more depth. They can take place at your location or at Useful Plants Nursery, at Earthaven Ecovillage near Black Mountain, NC.

Growing useful plants
Site and landscape design
Permaculture design

Growing useful plants

Great edible plants and how to grow them

The focus of this session will be on the best fruiting trees, shrubs, vines, herbaceous perennials, and medicinals for an edible landscape in the Carolinas. We’ll discuss more than 40 well-adapted, delicious, and nutrient-rich, plants that are easy to grow right in your own yard without the use of pesticide chemicals or synthetic fertilizers. Growing your own food and medicine is becoming a vitally important strategy for regaining control over our collective and personal lives, our health, and our individual and bioregional economic well-being. Learn to grow for production and nutrition from May to November and be on your way to liberation through abundance.

Right plant, right place: Food and medicine plants in your yard

Learn to read your landscape and maximize your site’s productive potential. First you must assess your site and its limiting factors. Next you must create beneficial microclimates and planting niches. Third, you must choose the right plant for the right place. Then plant and maintain it for optimum growth, productivity, and health. Get the inside scoop on the best species and varietal recommendations from the familiar apple and pear to jujube, persimmion, paw paw, nuts, berries, vines, and mushrooms. You’ll be captivated by the possibilities and confident to begin transforming your home landscape into a highly productive food and medicine garden.

Phytonutritional plants

Let your food be your medicine. Do you know that elderberries contain powerful constituents that can help keep away the flu? How about the humble blueberry? Did you know that it contains a very high content of beneficial antioxidants and health promoting compounds that can reverse the effects of aging on the brain? Why take expensive supplements when you can grow vitamin, mineral, and oil rich foods right in your own yard. These homegrown plants, including familiar ones like mulberries, kiwis, figs, blackberries, contain phytonutrients that help protect us from arthritis and allergies to cancer and other degenerative conditions. Learn about these powerful healing fruits and how to grow them yourself.

Growing less common fruits

This session is for those interested in broadening their local dietary and economic options. We will explore the world of little known uncommon fruits and medicine plants, discover their amazing qualities and teach you how to grow, process and use them. Enter the delightful world of some of Chuck’s favorite plants. Trees such as hawthorn, persimmon, jujube, and paw paw; shrubs such as shrub cherries, current, gooseberry, jostaberry, hardy orange, serviceberry, aronia, goumi; vines such as groundnut, jaogulan, schizandra.

Backyard economics: Unleashing your small property's production potential

Meet many of your food and medicinal needs while supplementing your income by integrating food crops into your home landscape. In additional to providing you with fresh and nutritious food and potential income, cultivating biological abundance has far-reaching ecological and economic benefits for your community, and the world. This class explores some practical schemes, strategies, design approaches, crops, products, and marketing ideas for unleashing the productive potential of your yard and your community.

Pruning fruits and berries

Learn to prune your fruit trees for peak production, health and longevity. Join pruning expert Chuck Marsh for an educational and hands-on workshop where you will learn the basics of pruning: winter/spring/summer/fall pruning, the effect of pruning on plant growth and fruit production, pruning tools, and healthy tree and bush pruning techniques and guidelines. We’ll cover pruning techniques for a wide variety of fruit trees, berry bushes, and fruiting vines and discuss some little known pruning techniques. Note: if this workshop takes place at Earthaven ecovillage, we’ll have the opportunity to see both new and established orchards.

Sculpting and weaving plants: The fine art of biotecture

This workshop will be an exploration of useful plants and how we can grow them in little known ways. Learn to grow fruit trees as shrubs, grow your own garden furniture, make a willow "igloo," create a living fence, grow fruit trees on their own roots, and create living garden sculptures. Learn to cultivate the adventurous gardener in yourself as we grow ourselves back home.

Plant-specific workshops

Take and in-depth look at a specific species for selection, planting, care, pruning, fertilization, and more. Choose Blueberry Production, Growing Kiwis, Bramble Basics, Fruit Tree Overview, Strawberries for Profit, At-home Mushroom Production, etc.

Useful plants workshop series

We can do a series of six classes with a general introduction to edible landscaping followed by a day each on trees, shrubs, vines, herbaceous perennials, and medicinal plants. Make it specific to your site or community project and give your group the time to take a deeper look at the all the options.

Site and landscape design

Designing and creating your edible landscape

Design your way to liberation through abundance. This class will give you the basics for designing and managing a Permaculture-based edible landscape by matching your needs and site with the plants appropriate for your situation. Whether it’s for orchards, hedges, forest gardens, or small-lot city gardening, you’ll learn about mapping your site, soil improvement, site analysis, the art of placement, plant nutrition and fertility management, water, maintenance, microclimates, pollination, season extension, animals in the system and disease and pest control strategies. We’ll discuss 39 basic hardy plants for edible landscaping in this bioregion and beyond. This half day to day long workshop can be divided into two halves, one on design and one on edible landscaping plants.

Introduction to Permaculture

Design your way home to liberation through abundance. This class will cover the Permaculture design principles, and give you the basics for designing and managing a Permaculture and edible landscape by matching your needs and site with the plants, animals, strategies, and techniques appropriate for your situation. Learn to integrate home vegetable gardens, home orchards, food producing hedges, forest gardens, urban animals, and space intensive or small-lot city gardening, you’ll learn permaculture design basics including the art of placement, building biomass for plant nutrition and soil fertility, water and energy conservation, and how to use microclimates and biological systems, to create

Cultivating the future: Engaging children in the landscape

Recent studies have found that children’s early experiences in nature play a large part in their environmental consciousness as adults. Creating gardens that actively engage children can be a great way to connect them more deeply to the natural world. This workshop will explore strategies for designing and implementing kid friendly gardens and landscapes. We will look at the best kid-friendly plants to include in your garden, as well as easy-to-build garden structures and water features for children.

Site design: The art of placing your home in the landscape

You bought your land, now what? What you create will support your life for years to come or be a series of ongoing problems. Avoid costly mistakes and learn how to assess your land for roads and access ways, outbuildings, water sources, waste treatment, gardens, orchards and of course, your home site. You’ll understand how to create a site and needs assessment, conduct research and gather pertinent geographical and geological information, track climate, solar, water, and air variables, and study the existing vegetation for keys to health. We’ll discuss using earthworks and good social design to create the best possible solutions for your homestead.

Managing water in the landscape

Water is a crucial part of our everyday lives. How do we make responsible and informed choices about our water resources? The basis of every good permaculture design deals with effective management of your water resources. Learn about the following: how water moves and how to work with the dynamics of that flow; how to avoid the dangers of erosion; catching, storing and using water at its highest potential; designing effective water harvesting systems; moving water in the landscape; simple, low-tech irrigation and greywater systems.

Ecological strategies for difficult sites

There are basic patterns inherent in mountain landscapes that are helpful to know when gardening in the Southern Appalachians. Learn about the soil/water complex, including how to deal with slopes, unstable banks, water drainage, retaining walls, ponds, swales, terraces, and erosion control and revegetation strategies. We’ll discuss how to correct compacted, poorly drained, or dry and droughty soils, as well as strategies for dealing with invasive weed challenges. Understand the removal of trees as well as how to introduce new species of trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, grasses, and annuals.

Designing neighborhood orchards

Most city lots are too small for an orchard. But what if everyone cooperated and developed an overall plan? Soon there’d be diverse fruit production and neighbors would be able to share in the harvest of apples, pears, blueberries, brambles, etc. We’ll discuss strategies for planting, caring, and sharing the load as well as social strategies to engage your neighbors and build community scale food self reliance right where you live. It’s hard to imagine a better way to build interdependent interactive communities as we remake our towns and cities.

Permaculture design courses

These are intensive one to two week courses in Permaculture Design that are usually taught by a team of experienced Permaculture teachers.

Permaculture fundamentals

Join Chuck for an eight-day intensive on the principles and practice of permaculture design. Permaculture is an ethical, ecologically based design system for creating regenerative human habitats. The fundamentals course will give you the information and training you need to begin using biologically based systems to transform your home, your property, your community and your life.

For Earthaven Ecovillage based courses, enjoy the setting of North America’s first permaculture designed ecovillage. Systems are in place demonstrating natural building, ecological site designs, cooperative businesses, renewable energy, sustainable forestry, cohousing, wastewater treament, Useful Plants Nursery, and more. For courses at your site, enjoy site specific analysis and design ideas. Completion of this course and a design practicum leads to a Permaculture Design Course Certificate.

Permaculture design practicum or village and ecovillage design

Join Chuck for part two of the Permaculture Design Course for people interested in practicing Permaculture professionally. Combining the larger subjects of the Permaculture curriculum, students will work in teams with a focus on either the design of a village landscape and culture or another site-specific permaculture design. Experienced designers will lead small groups in design projects. Students will develop skills in mapping, field survey and drawing, economic, social, and community design, broadscale agriculture systems, wildlife management, earthworks, restoration forestry, client interview and presentation skills, project management, and earning a living in Permaculture.

About Chuck Marsh

Chuck Marsh is an engaging and empowering speaker whose encyclopedic knowledge of useful plants, permaculture, and site design, never fails to inspire and encourage the grower in all of us. Permaculture trainer and designer, landscape artist, and Earthaven Ecovillage cofounder and site-planner, Chuck founded Useful Plants Nursery, a permaculture-based nursery specializing in useful, phytonutritional, food, and medicine plants well-adapted to our Southern Appalachian mountains and surrounding bioregions. His permaculture design and consulting practice, Living Systems Design, helps individuals, families, schools, and communities to develop edible landscapes, while conserving and using available resources to create regenerative human habitats in right relationship with the natural world. He has thirty years’ experience designing and managing gardens, landscapes, and other outdoor projects in the Southeast and consults and teaches nationally and internationally.

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