What is it?

A Grounded Moonthly is a community meetup typically focused around creating or developing a community or household edible, wildlife-friendly garden, according to a permaculture design. Moonthly’s can also involve sustainable non-food growing projects. For example, eco-friendly builds such as making compost toilets or retro-fits of existing homes as well as growing fibre for clothes or planting for fuel. If you come along you’ll:

  • Learn about permaculture and gardening through skills shares and mini-workshops

  • Build community networks

  • Share some yummy meals

  • and have lots of fun

Who comes along?

Everyone is welcome – don’t worry if you’ve never done any gardening before since coming along to a Moonthly is a great way to learn. There are always a variety of jobs to suit, whatever your experience or physical ability. We have had people of all ages come along – from 5 to 75 years so far!

What happens?

You’ll be welcomed with a hot drink, we introduce each other, go through the plan for the day and get started with the activities. The facilitator(s) will show you what needs to be done, which can include a variety of different jobs including: moving soil, manure or woodchips for new veg beds or mulching; planting; installing water butts; pruning; construction work (creating raised beds or bug hotels for example) or creating irrigation systems.

Skill-shares

Depending on what is relevant for the day, other skill-shares both formal and informal, can include such things as how to: plant seeds; prune fruit trees; set up a wormery or other compost system; how to saw, hammer or drill; create planters or raised beds; how to store rainwater; make bug hotels; create a mobile chicken coop and inoculate logs with mushroom spores.

Mini-workshops

We often have mini-workshops to explain the understanding behind the permaculture design that is being implemented. That might include topics such as: the benefits of raised beds, why use a no-dig system, traditional edible plants that grow naturally, how does composting work, what is the soil-food-web, why forest gardens and what to consider when mulching.

Shared Meals

The host provides a good homemade lunch. Often people also bring food to share as well. We’ll generally stop around 5pm, have a cup of tea and admire our achievement – there’s usually quite a transformation. Expect to leave buzzing with ideas from what you’ve learnt and done, having met lots of interesting people.