Free Online Courses for Creative Folks Who Love Plants

Select from a unique collection of unique and original courses & resources based on permaculture, friendship marketing, the heroine’s journey. I specialize in stuff for women writers, but you don’t have to be a writer nor a woman to enjoy my work–all types of creative people will love these resources.

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Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community

This was my first book, published in 2006 and based on a decade of community gardening and grassroots activism. Read the entire, original text, with more than 90 original illustrations by Jackie Holmstrom, for free!

Read it
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Naked Lady Soup

Naked Lady Soup, a semi-fiction novella by Food Not Lawns author and founder, Heather Jo Flores, chronicles a year in the life of a post-traumatic 30-something childfree Chicana, trying to find magnificent love in the patriarchal shitstew we call America.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll shake your fist at the stars.

Complete with two recipe variations for how to make a steaming pot of Naked Lady Soup.

160 pages, PDF, FREE in exchange for your email address. I’ll send you something focused on women writers, about once a month. Unsubscribe anytime.

Free Book

Permaculture Women Magazine

I am one of more than 100 writers contributing to this collaborative publication.

Here’s a selection of articles I wrote about permaculture:

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Access to Land

8 places you might be able to garden if you don’t have access to land.
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Eat the Weeds!

12 delicious and nutritious foods you’re probably already growing
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Food Not Lawns

How and why to turn your lawn into a garden.
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Into Permaculture? Check out my YouTubes!

This video was created for the free online course at https://www.freepermaculture.com/permaculture-for-beginners Partial video transcript Hi, folks, it's me, Heather Jo Flores, and I just want to talk to you a little bit about getting started with permaculture because a lot of people ask me this question. So we talk about what is permaculture? Permaculture is a design system for sustainable living, it's a way to bring your ethics into alignment with your daily actions. The set of tools and techniques that permaculture uses can be employed for designs on every scale and in every project that they are employed, even if it doesn't become a completely closed loop system, that system definitely becomes more ecological, sometimes with very little effort.
6 Ways to Get Started with Permaculture
YouTube Video VVU2TkppNTJyZTRSVVV0SFdoTUxiOXlnLkgySDAtcWZRMjkw
This video is part of the online permaculture courses taught and organized by Heather Jo Flores visit www.freepermaculture.com www.permaculturewomen.com www.foodnotlawns.com Hey, everyone, I just want to talk for a few minutes about where to practice permaculture, where you can grow food and connect with the plants even if you don't have immediate access to land. So there's lots of options even if you live in an apartment or an intense urban environment. If you're just renting and you think you won't be there very long, you don't want to invest time and energy into the space where you live then here are some other options. So ideally, as we know, permaculture isn't just about gardening. And if you're going to practice permaculture and practice building whole systems design, then you need an opportunity to create a system. So even if you live in an apartment and you decide, oh, I want to do this permaculture project in this other place, you still should at least think about how you can tie that in with your home system, even if you can't step outside your door and have access to your permaculture garden right there. How is it connected? How are the inputs and outputs? How are they flowing between the two places where you live and where you work in the garden? So let's talk about that for a few minutes, and I'm just going to brainstorm through some options. So the first and most obvious place is to check out the roof of the building that you live in. A lot of apartment buildings do have roof access. And there are some extraordinary examples in cities all over the world of communities working together to create rooftop gardens and farms. So check that out. The next most obvious place is to look at your local parks and community gardens and see if there is some sort of system within your local community to give you access to land, a little plot that you can rent or a program that you can participate in, in which you will be able to have some space to grow food. Another option is to just make friends with the neighbors. If you don't have land and they do, then maybe you can work out some sort of arrangement with them where you do a certain amount of work and they take a certain amount of the produce, or you could just become friends and participate in this process together. So, you know, the neighbor's lawn is an option, even if you don't have one that you can turn into food. Another option is to get out of town and go volunteer at a local farm or on a larger piece of land where you can participate in an organic agriculture system and see perhaps a working farm where there is companion planting and maybe have a perennial food forest. Maybe they have cash crops. There's lots of things you can learn about your food system and be able to sort of conceptualize if you don't want to stay where you are, where do you want to go? And the more sites you visit that you think might have the type of system you dream about, the more likely you're going to be able to conceptualize that system for yourself. So go check out some local farms and see if you can become a part of that and hook up with free vegetables and garden starts and make friends and learn more that way. So it's a really nice way to get your hands in the soil. It's just, you know, hop on a bus or hop in the car and go out to your favorite local organic farm. Another thing that a lot of people don't consider is that you can depave your sidewalk, our driveway. So if you do have a little bit of access to a courtyard or a driveway and and you can't grow anything there, you can only do container's let's say and you want to really grow some stuff in the ground, you can remove the concrete. I've seen some really beautiful community gardens evolve in places that were depaved. One space that I'm thinking of, it was a shared parking lot between a few apartment buildings. And they, a few of them had cars, but most of them didn't so they collectively decided that the few people who had cars could park on the street and everyone else participated to dig up the asphalt. And they put in this really sweet little garden place like a community firepit. And it's a really nice way to get back to the land, literally right through the through the concrete. And then there's always guerrilla gardening, which is basically growing food in the existing landscape. So this can happen on a small scale. This can be as small as putting some seeds in at a local park where, you know, it's getting watered.
How to find a place to grow food when you don't have access to land
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Here are a handful of ways you can start doing permaculture, even if you don't have a green thumb or don't have access to a place to grow food. This video was created for the free online Permaculture Design for Beginners course. Visit www.freepermaculture.com/permaculture-for-beginners #permaculture #permaculturegarden #growyourownfood #foodnotlawns So we've been saying the Permaculture is not just about gardening, but what do we mean by that? What we mean is that it is also about energy and transportation and waste and community relationships, your relationship with yourself, it's about how your house is built and how that connects to the landscape around it. So in this video, we're going to explore a little bit more of permaculture beyond the garden. And as we cultivate our whole system designer's mindset, then think about how these ideas connect to what you want to do in your home and and in your garden, and especially if you're a renter or you're in a place right now where you don't feel like it's a permanent abode for you, maybe you don't want to put in a whole big food forest. So some of these ideas in this video will help you sort of conceptualize how you can start practicing permaculture right now no matter where you are. One of the most important things to think about is your transportation. How do you get around? How does your food get to your table? Farm to table is great, but how did it get there and how far away was the farm? So if you're thinking about how to incorporate permaculture ideas into your life, start with transportation. So one of the most important parts of this work is the community relationships. You can build these interactive communities that really make it possible to consume a lot less resources. We live here in this neighborhood where everyone knows each other and people freely share stuff like eggs and cheese and extra baby plants, and it's a really awesome way to participate in a system, even though we're only renting. Energy is a really big part of this as well. How are you consuming energy? Where are you getting your electricity? How are you heating your water? How are you cooking your food? If you look up there, you can see our solar water heater and here in this house, we don't have solar electricity, but we would like to have that. But you know, you have to sort of weigh the pros and the cons. So there's a lot of different things to think about. And you should do the math in your own situation. But for us, it definitely makes a lot of sense because we have a ton of sun here. So it would make no sense at all to use gas or electricity to heat our water. So make common sense decisions, think about the whole system. And also having the water heater gives us just one more thing to add to our home system to help us pull things into a greater ecological harmony with the whole. So even if we're not growing all of our own grains and proteins, which we are, we have a nice walnut tree, so we're growing a lot of protein, but we are still purchasing protein, but at least we're heating our own water. So, you know, every little bit counts and you're not going to achieve a perfectly sustainable system, but you're going to learn so much about how to be a part of nature and your quality of life is going to become so much better, even if you're only doing little bits here and there. (talks to neighbor in Spanish) and then another thing you can and should consider is the waste cycle. Are you recycling your compost? Are you making best use of available resources? Are you resisting the urge to buy unnecessary items and and not use them in your house? Are you accumulating other people's waste that you thought was a resource and then not using it?
Permaculture isn't just Gardening! Here's what we mean when we say that.
YouTube Video VVU2TkppNTJyZTRSVVV0SFdoTUxiOXlnLnV6aEpHbGR5czNJ
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