Orchard Garden Day 10: Posters, Signs, and Dandelion Braids

Today was the first day of workshop planning, and we made some great progress! 

We spent the morning in Scarfe putting together the poster and handout for our activities, laying out some of the information we will share with participants about food forests vs. conventional gardens, the purposes of signs, culinary and medicinal uses of dandelions, and the significance of braiding. Not quite our usual lovely outdoor atmosphere, but we got some good work done nonetheless. 

After lunch, we checked in on our guerilla garden outside Scarfe and enjoyed our newly heightened awareness of everything that is around us: we are all spending much more time observing the details of plants, insects, and life around us.

(We might have seen a new sprout?)

Mason bee house spotted!

We headed to the garden to take stock of our materials and prepare the wood we have for signs. Much sawing was accomplished (with very helpful guidance from Ian!) and we spent some time identifying plants around the garden that may benefit from having signage, compiling a list to guide our sign painting on Saturday. I found a completely free app for plant identification (it's called PlantNet - thanks to my mom for that one!) that seems quite effective, and it was very helpful in this task.

Finally, we turned our attention to the dandelion stems we harvested in our first week to try our hand at multi-strand braiding: we can’t exactly lead the activity if we don’t know how to do it ourselves. After lots of reading WikiHow, rewatching instructional videos, and coaching each other through the different steps, we successfully made 4, 5, and 6-strand braids with our dandelion stems. 

The colour variations and different textures in our finished braids were beautiful and I’m really looking forward to sharing these techniques. It was a great experience highlighting the reciprocity of braiding, as mentioned by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass: one person holds the strands while the other braids. We also experienced the reciprocity of teaching and learning, helping each other to accomplish something which none of us had done before, but to which we all brought different techniques and perspectives. I'm looking forward to sharing some of these same learnings at our workshop on Saturday!