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Mission Statement
Our mission is to celebrate the connection between personal health and wild lands.We manifest this goal through promoting and practicing sustainable practices. Examples of our work include growing, harvesting and preparing local, wild and living food for the community, educating about the great values of the wild edible abundance available in our area, providing local microgreens for the public schools, restaurants and stores, biking or driving on alternative fuel when possible, utilizing solar dehydrators, bicycle powered blender and wheatgrass juicer and educating about organic land stewardship practices. |
2017 Current Events
Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants * Permaculture * Holistic Health * Living Food Nutrition
This three-month program is a deep exploration of wild edible and medicinal plants, living food nutrition, permaculture design and holistic health. It is an experiential journey of internal and external health. We will cover practical applications of topics including: harvesting wild foods for our daily diet, creating simple to gourmet living food recipes, making herbal medicines, building solar dehydrators, learning about soil mycology, making cultured and fermented recipes, as well as integrating holistic practices into our daily lives. Each morning begins with a centering movement practice such as yoga, tai chi or meditation. The program dives into healing modalities such as natural therapeutics, Eastern philosophies, and detoxification cleanses. It will prepare students to be competent as local, wild, and living food chefs, to offer education on nutrition and holistic health, to lead wild food identification and medicinal preparation workshops, to practice permaculture design, to integrate healing modalities and incorporate deep earth-centered skills into daily life practices.
. Tuesday and Wednesday Mornings from 9am -12pm
. 3 Weekend Field Trips inlcuding a wild food focused backpacking trip, river trip, and winter hut trip
. Suggested Donation $33/class
For syllabus click here (PDF)
For more information, please contact Katrina Blair at turtlelakerefuge@yahoo.com or call 970-247-8395
"Honoring Origins and Seeding the Future"
Turtle Lake Refuge will have a booth and be providing wild green juice to all participants.
Katrina Blair will be presenting on Wild Weed Seeds.
Chi Foods Class - March 21- April 11
Tuesday Evenings from 5:30pm-8pm
A Healing Foods Experience with Wild Recipes and Qigong Movement
Open the doorway to optimal health through centering practices and locally grown, wild harvested and sustainable foods. Create a new way of life with abundant health for yourself and your community!
Please join us for this learning celebration about living well through total embodiment and the joyful art of local, wild and nutritional foods preparation. Our purpose for this hands-on learning event is to nourish our minds, bodies, and souls with the highest quality recipes and practices through a fun and sustainable approach. We will explore health regenerating practices and tasty recipes that are nourishing to ourselves, our community and the earth.
Class is taught by Katrina Blair, MA and Tyler VanGemert, LAc
Class includes, centering movement, food, instruction and handouts!
Suggested Donation $111.00 (or $33/class)
Where: Rocky Mountain Retreat, 848 East 3rd Avenue in Durango, CO
For more information: Contact turtlelakerefuge@yahoo.com or Call 970-317-0988
Learn about the edible wild plants right under your feet! Move into openness to what the plants tell us! Discover cultivated and wild plants in various garden settings that can create salads, green smoothies, delicious raw recipes that fill us with vitality! Increase your knowledge of ways to encourage, plant, nurture, and sustainably harvest the most nutritious species of plants, both in the wild and in garden settings.
This weekend will begin in Ukiah Saturday morning at 9 AM at a Gardens Project garden with Tai Chi, Qigong and then a wild plant walk in the garden, orchard and surrounding areas. We will harvest some edible wild plants and prepare some foods for a wild foods lunch. This is a stand-alone class or the introduction to an intensive continuing in the afternoon at Floodgate Farm on Heart Mountain above Redwood Valley. The permaculture gardens showcase many of the edible wild as well as cultivated plants used in Floodgate Farm’s salad mix. After movement meditation and a sitting meditation with the plant that calls each participant, we will discuss each of the chosen as well as many other plants.
In the late afternoon Saturday we will prepare recipes, both raw and cooked, followed by dinner and a music and art share-along (singing, jamming including original songs, poetry, …). Sunday morning will be movement followed by another session with the plants, discussing those not covered on Saturday, followed by a wild foods lunch. Sunday afternoon will be a study of growing and harvesting methods, and the microclimates we have created using terracing, hugelkultur, berms and swales, and planting in guilds.
With 4 instructors, participants will gain a wealth of medicinal, nutrition, propagation, and growing information on dozens of the most nutritious and common plants we are lucky to have amongst us.
Cost: $50/$30 morning class, $135/$85/day or$250/$150 (sliding scale) weekend. Camping and room space available Saturday night for additional cost. Scholarships available; when registering please give to the scholarship fund if you can!
The instructors:
Tyler VanGemert, LAc, Environmental Biologist, Acupuncturist, and Master of Traditional Oriental Medicine
Katrina Blair, Health Educator, author of The Wild Wisdom of Weeds, founder of Turtle Lake Refuge
Jaye Alison Moscariello, Painter, Farmer, Salad University Instructor, Self-Taught Raw Foods Chef
Bill Taylor, Farmer, Salad University Instructor, Pianist, Composer
