Hopefully you've heard that Root Cellars Rock launched our new Food Skills Workshops this week. Throughout July the first events will be happening across the province to try out this new resource. Check out the schedule of events to attend one.
This post is to get you a bit more acquainted with what the workshops are and how they work.
All of the workshops can be found for free download here. At the beginning of each workshop is a table of contents to help you navigate the whole thing, because they are quite long; some over 100 pages! There is a lot of great information about food skills jam-packed (ha! canning!) into each one.
Each workshop has 5 major parts:
- Introduction & Things to Keep in Mind: All the useful details on the who, what, where, when and how of hosting a successful workshop so that your group can get things organized as easily as possible.
- Evaluation: Ways to evaluate the workshops you host so that they get even better in the future and so that FSN can improve the kits.
- Appendices: Practical tools to use when hosting a workshop like food safety fact sheets, budgeting resources, funding information, registration forms, and a calendar of seasonal harvest times for NL produce, among other things.
- Workshop & Digging In: The main content about each of the 8 topics: container gardening, composting, seed saving, edible wild plants, preparing local vegetables, using culinary herbs, canning and root cellars. (Exciting!)
- Supplementary Materials: More useful resources associated with each workshop like sheets to send home with participants listing all the links found in the workshops and charts summarizing some of the most important information.
The biggest tip there is for using these workshops is to just use what makes sense for your community! Don't feel like you need to memorize piles of information or do every hands-on activity. Talk to the people around you, find out what they're interested in and how they like to learn things and then just take what makes sense for your group from the kits. It can be as simple or as elaborate as you make it, everything from a short 5 minute activity at the end of a regular group meeting to a full day food skills retreat is possible using these workshops.
FSN is really keen to receive feedback about your experiences using the Food Skills Workshops. We see these as living documents that will over time be adapted to better suit the needs of community groups. We especially love receiving photos and videos recording your experiences, so that we can show off to the whole province all the amazing things happening! Please don't hesitate to contact us with questions or to let us know you're hosting a workshop so that we can hook you up with other people and resources that could be of help. Contact Sarah at info@rootcellarsrock.ca or (709)237-4026.
