In early September we’ll be running a 3-day Market Garden Masterclass at the fabulous Allsun Farm in Gundaroo, which will be taught by Joyce Wilkie and Mike Plane, two long-time organic market gardeners (and our mentors for the Milkwood market garden).

This 3-day class is a chance for folks with good backyard (or larger scale) vegetable growing experience to learn the ins and outs of setting up a thriving organic market garden as an enterprise – whether that be a family enterprise, a community enterprise, or whatever else your situation needs.

Allsun Farm, home of Joyce Wilkie and Mike Plane

We’re running this masterclass at Allsun Farm so that everyone can have the benefit of walking Joyce and Mike’s farm and seeing all the tricks and workarounds, the crop layouts and orchards, the complimentary animal enterprises and of course all the tools and infrastructure that Allsun has built up over the years.

The course content will similar to our previous Starting an Organic Market Garden courses that we’ve held at Milkwood Farm with Joyce and Mike, but as interest in this field of skills grows (yay) there’s clearly a need for a masterclass and a beginners course both. So that’s what we’re doing.

Students bed making with human-scale methods (it doesn’t actually take that long)

And the result – community-scale gherkins! And lots of other things, too.

Allsun Farm has many small-scale integrated enterprises, like free-range eggs

Allsun Farm last Autumn…

Joyce with another important market garden integration. Pigs eat spoiled or fruit-fly bitten veggies before problems can set in, and help tractor new ground when needed.

If you are interested in doing this sort of training this spring, here’s the breakdown of the course curriculum split:

> Organic Market Garden Masterclass will dive straight into the business of market gardening and the nitty gritty of crop rotation, integrated pest management, infrastructure, movable greenhouses, harvesting, packing and direct marketing. If you have never grown anything before, then this may not be the course for you – there is a fair bit of assumed knowledge in this one. Facebook event page.

> Intro to Organic Market Gardening will be held at Milkwood Farm with Michael Hewins at the helm. This will be two days of how to get either a small market garden or a large kitchen garden started from scratch with best practice organic techniques. This course will cover crop rotation, integrated pest management, bed making, how to grow different families of vegetables, harvest and storage. If you have never grown anything before you could do this course, as long as you were keen and had done some reading prior. Facebook event page.

Michael Hewins in the Milkwood Farm market garden. We went small to start, but we’ve learned a lot this first year, so next season we should be able to meet our production goal of 90% of vegetable needs for Milkwood Farm, year round.

At Milkwood Farm we’re currently planning a bit of an expansion to the Milkwood market garden, after a first successful year filled with lessons learned and, thankfully, lots of nutrient dense and downright delicious vegetables. Watch this space for what the spring brings…

>> More posts on our organic market gardening journey at Milkwood Farm