2024 Spring Gardening Immersion
We meet with our hands in the Soil
to receive the medicine of the Earth
and remember how to truly feed ourselves.
Soul Gardens Immersion 2024 is a 11-week ritual farming experience,
starting April 3rd through June 12th
We meet every Wednesday at SunSong Community in Barnardsville, NC
with one gardening service trip to Cherokee
to receive the medicine of the Earth
and remember how to truly feed ourselves.
Soul Gardens Immersion 2024 is a 11-week ritual farming experience,
starting April 3rd through June 12th
We meet every Wednesday at SunSong Community in Barnardsville, NC
with one gardening service trip to Cherokee
Soul Gardens Spring Gardening Immersion is a program that teaches adults a deeply connected form of gardening and tending the Earth through the seasons. Participants are immersed into deep care for the Earth, holistic living and sacred service. The program takes place over the spring growing season at SunSong, a vibrant land-based community dedicated to living in harmony with each other and the Earth. On our farm, we grow fruits, vegetables, staple crops, medicinal and culinary herbs and flowers using organic, no-till, non-mechanized, methods.
This program is our response to environmental degradation, climate chaos, social injustice, the mental health crisis and other ails of our society. We believe that we need to take responsibility for ourselves and how we live, from the ground up. Being in deep connection to our food, medicine, land, community and the cycles and rhythms of these mountains and sharing that with you is our prayer for a regenerative culture that exists in balance and harmony with all of life.
This program is our response to environmental degradation, climate chaos, social injustice, the mental health crisis and other ails of our society. We believe that we need to take responsibility for ourselves and how we live, from the ground up. Being in deep connection to our food, medicine, land, community and the cycles and rhythms of these mountains and sharing that with you is our prayer for a regenerative culture that exists in balance and harmony with all of life.
Together, we are remembering our ancestral roots of tending the Earth,
how to nourish ourselves with food from the garden,
how to work together, find belonging in community
and be in service to something greater than ourselves.
how to nourish ourselves with food from the garden,
how to work together, find belonging in community
and be in service to something greater than ourselves.
☀ Our Microcosmic Curriculum ☀
Our program’s curriculum is designed to feed not only the macrocosm, the Earth’s garden, but also the microcosm, our inner Soul Garden. With this curriculum, we learn the practicalities of tending and cultivating the land for abundant harvests. Through the metaphor of gardening, we learn to tend our own inner garden -- planting seeds of intention, weeding out what doesn’t serve us and celebrating and integrating the harvests. Each moment in the garden is an opportunity to grow ourselves in different ways. The curriculum arc flows with the seasons, giving each participant a deeper connection to the Earth’s rhythms and the cycles of life. Throughout the day, Scotty, Maayan and the other Soul Garden facilitators offer focused workshops and teachings, tending to each individual’s unique experience level with gardening.
Participants learn how to...
Tend the Earth
|
Tend to Heart, Mind & Spirit
|
☀ Facilitator Team ☀
|
Scotty Greenheart (he/him) is the co-founder of Soul Gardens. He believes that everyone has a unique and special soul purpose and wants to mentor those people whose purpose involves tending and caring for our sweet Mother Earth. Scotty grew up gardening with his Momma and has kept his own garden since 2010, soaking up all the experiential knowledge that comes through tending plants through the seasons. For the 2024 Spring Gardening Immersion, Scotty is the lead gardening teacher and shares his passion for teaching with offerings on composting, holistic orchard care, soil science and remineralization, compost tea, growing staple crops & medicine making. For more about Scotty, check out Our Team page.
Maayan Chelsea Greenheart (she/they) is a mother, Earth steward, Flower worshipper and belly feeder. She has spent the last decade of her life dedicated to feeding the people in nourishing ways. She lives in community at SunSong where she collaboratively tends an abundant garden, sings to the Flowers and hugs the Grandmother Trees. She values peaceful communication, rites of passage and initiation, song sharing and spiritual reciprocity. Full of aliveness and connected to her emotions, Maayan embodies and inspires celebration of the life’s miracles while holding space for the grief that comes with honoring the tragedies of the state of humanity & Planet Earth. For the 2024 Spring Gardening Immersion, Maayan will be sharing her gifts through facilitating earth-based rituals & group singing and teaching gardening and food preservation. For more about Maayan, see Our Team page. Chloe Lieberman (she/her) grew up in the territory of live oaks, bay laurels, redwoods, red tailed hawks, white tailed deer and serpentine stones, where fog rolls in every evening on the Northern California coast, in the unceded territory of the Coast Miwok people, in what’s now known at Marin County. Wonder, awe and a deep love for the living world around her has stirred in her heart as long as she remembers.
For the past 20 years, she has devoted her hands, heart, and busily buzzing mind to exploring the relationships between food, community, and spirituality. Care and curiosity took her to nearly 10 different countries around the world to visit, learn from, and participate in various community-based agricultural projects. She studied old stories and new ways of weaving culture with Martín Prechtel at his international school, Bolad’s Kitchen. Between 2013 and 2022, she co-managed an Appalachian homestead where she and others produced 80% of their own food through organic gardening, orcharding, mushroom cultivation, and animal husbandry. For the past nine years she has worked with Wild Abundance, a school of permaculture and carpentry just north of Asheville, NC. She and Wild Abundance founder and director, Natalie Bogwalker co-created the world’s most comprehensive online gardening program. For the 2024 Spring Gardening Immersion, Chloe will be sharing her love for the Earth & community through facilitating group connection and teaching about garden planning, seeds and seed saving. |
☀ Work ~ Learning Balance ☀
“Work is Love Made Visible”
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
On program days at SunSong, we work together to tend our community’s garden. You will learn permaculture, small scale farming, gardening and deep nature connection with your hands in the dirt.
We value wellness in body, mind and spirit, which is why we start our mornings with movement, mindfulness practices, gratitude and check-ins. Next, we learn while we work and take breaks often to answer questions, connect and admire beauty. In addition to hands-on learning, every day there are 2-3 hours dedicated to focused learning & enrichment time.
During this enrichment time, we gather for lectures, workshops, games and connection activities that weave all the participants and facilitators in a web of interconnection.
We value wellness in body, mind and spirit, which is why we start our mornings with movement, mindfulness practices, gratitude and check-ins. Next, we learn while we work and take breaks often to answer questions, connect and admire beauty. In addition to hands-on learning, every day there are 2-3 hours dedicated to focused learning & enrichment time.
During this enrichment time, we gather for lectures, workshops, games and connection activities that weave all the participants and facilitators in a web of interconnection.
“My experience was beautiful, bountiful and profound. I loved learning from Maayan and Scotty as they are both compassionate heartfelt teachers who care for all, and put in the tremendous effort, planning the day and balancing the work with the workshops. I learn a tremendous amount about food, seeds, planting, weeding, harvesting, composting, food preservation from March-November, all with love, gratitude and reciprocity with Mother Earth. The experiences of connecting with like-hearted beings on deep levels while gardening together enriched by soul and life.”
~Michelle Shine, PhD, Participant 2020
~Michelle Shine, PhD, Participant 2020
“There are not enough words to fully display my admiration for Maayan and Scotty. When I first entered this program I was extremely skeptical. As a person of color I am always skeptical of ritualistic led by white groups. I’m happy I stuck with it. This space emboldened me to embrace myself in a world that has always tried to make me smaller. This program taught me that how I show up is never too much. I also learned a lot about growing a range of foods, but ultimately the interpersonal growth I experienced here has changed my life. Thank you 💜”
~Inez Figueroa, Participant 2023
~Inez Figueroa, Participant 2023
☀ Dates & Times ☀
Soul Gardens Immersion is a 11-week program, running April 3rd through June 12th
We meet Every Wednesday at SunSong in Barnardsville, NC, 10am-5pm
We meet Every Wednesday at SunSong in Barnardsville, NC, 10am-5pm
☀ The Daily Rhythm ☀
|
10-11am Good morning circle (includes homegrown herbal tea, song, gratitude sharing, movement practice and morning teachings) 11am-12:30pm Garden projects, learning with our hands in the dirt 12:30pm-1:30 Break and Morning Lecture 1:30-2:30 Homemade & homegrown organic lunch 2:30-4:30 Lectures, workshops and heart-centered activities 4:30-5 Closing circle, reflections on the day *Since we're working with living systems, know that this schedule is subject to change based on weather and circumstance* |
☀ Cost ☀
Tuition includes:
For all of this, we ask for an exchange of $1,150 USD.
We are aware of the effects of systemic racism and inequality in our society. Because of this, we offer full to partial scholarships for Black, Indigenous, and People of Culture (BIPOC). Please inquire in your application for more information.
This program is welcome to and celebratory of all human expressions of gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. We hope to create a safe space for humans of any expression. To this end, as a community and as individuals, we are open to feedback as to how we can improve, learn, and grow.
- All lectures, workshops and activities
- Hand-outs, resource lists and song recordings
- Weekly Q&A about home gardening endeavors
- Homegrown organic lunch on the farm and herbal teas
- Various food, medicine and plant starts to take home from the farm over the course of the season
- Service trip to Cherokee
For all of this, we ask for an exchange of $1,150 USD.
We are aware of the effects of systemic racism and inequality in our society. Because of this, we offer full to partial scholarships for Black, Indigenous, and People of Culture (BIPOC). Please inquire in your application for more information.
This program is welcome to and celebratory of all human expressions of gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. We hope to create a safe space for humans of any expression. To this end, as a community and as individuals, we are open to feedback as to how we can improve, learn, and grow.
THIS PROGRAM IS FOR YOU IF...
- You have always wanted to garden but don’t know where to start
- You want to deepen your knowledge of gardening
- You want a hands-on, hands in the dirt experience of learning how to grow a garden
- You want more community connection and interdependence
- You long to care for the Earth
- You want to explore your life's purpose
- You want to learn how to share more vulnerably, listen more deeply and communicate with grace
- You crave collaboration and working together
- You want to deepen into Earth-based ritual and spirituality
- You are excited to get your hand dirty and play in the dirt!
