The Sacred Gardener School

This is a two year program.
First year: MAY 10-14 AND AUGUST 16-20, 2023
Second Year : JULY 10-14 AND SEPTEMBER 11-15, 2024

Payment plan options are available, option to choose this is within the checkout process.

This fee is for one year (MAY 10-14 AND AUGUST 16-20, 2023) of the two years of the School.

Payment for the second year will be arranged after the second session. (JULY 10-14 AND SEPTEMBER 11-15, 2024).

We offer you the chance to name your price for the School, please type what you choose into the box below and proceed to checkout. The registration form is within the checkout process.

Regular Price: $1350 +HST
Benefactor Price: $1800 +HST (offer this fee to support someone who would like to come but is in need of support).
Financial Support Price $1150+ HST (2 spaces available. We offer this on trust that you know your situation best).

TO Register:
Fee + What's Included
Schedule
Accommodations
Payment Plans
Contact

This is a two year program. 
This fee is for one year (MAY 10-14 AND AUGUST 16-20, 2023) of the two years of the School.
Payment for the second year will be arranged after the second session. (JULY 10-14 AND SEPTEMBER 11-15, 2024).

We offer you the chance to name your price for the School, please type what you choose into the box below and proceed to checkout. The registration form is within the checkout process.

Regular Price: $1350 +HST
Benefactor Price: $1800 +HST (offer this fee to support someone who would like to come but is in need of support).
Financial Support Price $1100+ HST

Payment plan is available. This fee includes your camping spot (we also have our timberframe with a dorm space, $30/night), teachings and all your meals for the time you are here. All the meals are created as much as possible from food grown here, either in our gardens, preserved from the previous year's bounty, or from our wild food gatherings.  Many of the meals you will help gather or harvest for. The teachings are brought home in your body through what has been grown here on the land.

Schedule : The first day of each session is a Wednesday, arrival time is 4pm to set up and settle in, then we have dinner together at 5 and our first circle. Thursday to Saturday: breakfast  8-9am teachings are 9- 12 and 1:30 -5 (with lunch break between) Sunday breakfast 8-9am Teachings are 9-2, ending with lunch. Each session grows out of the teachings of the time of year that it happens. Enfolded within each session is learning about edible wild plants, herbal medicine, deeper teachings from the land, wildculture gardening and real nourishing food. What we do on a particular day depends on the weather and what's happening on the land. The dynamic of the group also has a part to play in how things unfold.

Your camping spot is included in the School fee. If you would prefer to stay indoors, we have a beautiful timberframe house that can sleep 8. Each person has their own visual privacy, access to nearby outhouse. It is heated with wood, and is set up for you to make tea and coffee. Learn more here: https://thesacredgardener.ca/product/dragonfly-house/

If you are interested in a private space and indoor bathroom, please have a look at nearby airbnb's here:
https://www.airbnb.ca/golden-lake-canada/stays

Payment options:

Most people choose 6 or 2 payments, but are open to however you would like to split payments up, if something works better. 

Please go through the purchase link below, our registration form is within it, and if you are sending an etransfer, or choosing a payment plan, please choose the etransfer/cheque option.

Please contact us with any questions. 

megan@thesacredgardener.ca

  • "The Sacred Gardener has taught me the elements of a most basic human way of honouring Earth. With Steven’s guidance and Megan’s culinary arts, I was offered a path to engage dynamically with Earth’s gifts of nourishment. Their approach has given me an intimate understanding of what is asked of me by plant beings in order to find my proper place in the natural order. I feel a greater sense of being at home and of knowing who I am. There is no other way of thanking The Sacred Gardener than to tend carefully in my corner of the world to the seeds they have sown." -Lorraine

The Sacred Gardener School is for those inspired to move into a deeper level of being; to live in a connected, sustainable and soulfully present way with the Earth. The school will foster your growth over time, enabling you to embody the living skills and ceremony needed to engage the larger spirit and ecology of the Earth, so She may bless and redirect our collective and personal path.

Many pieces must be in place for these teachings to unfold within us. To move into this deeper sacred space and then to be able to carry the knowledge in our life, takes years of personal work, a supportive community and guidance from elders who have gone through the transformation. The continuance of the Sacred Gardener School will afford our soul these gifts. The School and land Herself give students safety and nourishment to grow into a thick grape vine, that flows up, through and over the spiny armature of our life, bringing beauty and bearing heavy fruit.

At The Sacred Gardener we teach these skills and practices, not in an abstract detached way, but experientially, as we live them. Through these experiences, the culture of these arts inoculates the student. These arts, these cultures want to grow again, they want to be fed. When we connect with the Earth through them, they are being fed, and we in turn get fed, sheltered, clothed and healed. It’s a good deal for everyone.

These old arts are living beings that can open the way back to our ancestry and our mythic roots. They are mysterious gifts that lay at the foundation of our civilization. But these mysteries that we wed long ago, must be practiced within a sacred context or they lose their magic and become just another commodity, collecting dust with our other badges and trophies on a shelf in our mind.

At the Sacred Gardener we will help these living beings claim you, help you and them find a home again. These arts are an essential part of our humanity, and they are our inheritance. Handed down from our ancestors, these ancient ways form a chalice for us to carry the ‘holy’ to the next generation; and for us to sustain our soul. When we claim back these rites, we drink deeply from the holy and the wild elixir turns our life into art; into ceremony to feed the deep unnamable mystery that sustains us each moment.

Simply said, these sacred arts and practices ground, transform and elevate our daily routines. So, while we might have felt lost in the daily “grind”, we feel a daily rite of passage that keeps us aligned and connected with our soul, our ancestors and the spirit of the land.

Through the continued guidance and community of the school, through the nourishment to our wild soul, our spirit will rise up from the deepest spring of our being into wholeness, and pour out over the walls of our heart-well in wisdom and gratitude.

Some of the skills and rights you will be initiated into at The Sacred Gardener School, over two years, are:

Horticulture and Wildculture
Learn to recognize, sacredly harvest and process over a hundred wild plants at all stages of growth. Students will also learn many different homesteading skills and growing techniques; propagation, seed saving and breeding, grafting, sylviculture, indigenous forest gardening, polyculture annual crops and year round greenhouse growing. “The aim of my agricultural teaching isn’t just for you to replicate my techniques but rather to broaden your understanding of the land to the point where you can co-create in a hundred different ways that courts the place you’re working with into fecundity.”

Food Preparation and Storage
Participants will learn hands-on about preserving and storing food from the wilds and gardens; learn about drying, canning, freezing and ferments aplenty; miso from our own heritage beans, kraut and kimchi, keifers and Juns and many more living ferments. “Over the years Megan and I have worked out simple, efficient and ‘kid approved’ tasty ways to cook, process and store the bounty so that we can ‘live off the land’ year-round”.

Building
In our bioregional building projects we focus on the approach, not just on being off-grid and green but on using local and free recycled materials co-creatively to manifest unique and elegant, passive-solar heated houses that work with the land. Learn about Earthship, cob, stack wall, log and timber frame buildings, humanure systems, large-scale solar dehydrators. In 2018 we’re building a traditional timberframe (post and beam) with straw slip insulation. A beautiful building for the school. “We’ve built new buildings using ancient techniques and refinish-eco-fitted our 140 year old log house, with a year round greenhouse, and water jacket wood stove for hot water and heating the greenhouse at night. What was a cold, dark drafty house is now bright and warm. On sunny days the greenhouse heats not only itself but the house is filled with moist warm oxygen-rich air”.

Making Tools and Utensils
Learn how to make willow, birch or pine baskets, how to burn bowls, carve spoons.

Through the continued guidance and community of the school;  the nourishment to our wild soul, our spirit will rise up from the deepest spring of our being into wholeness, and pour out over the walls of our heart-well in wisdom and gratitude.