20% off everything! We’re staying open two more weekends: November 5&6, 12&13 10am – 5pm 15290 Coleman Valley Rd (upper driveway), Occidental CA Don’t miss your last chance to bring home some new green friends – just in time for rain!
Compost Revolution in the Mother Garden
As the number of guests in our retreat program has increased in recent years, so has the volume of food scraps that our kitchen produces. For decades, our chickens, goats, garden hot heap compost piles, and vermiculture (worm) bins were sufficient for processing our kitchen compost, but as we’ve ramped up our integrated food system, […]
Take a virtual or in-person garden tour!
After a long Covid hiatus, on-site tours of the gardens led by real live humans will resume this April! Join us 1st and 3rd Sundays of the month at 1pm, starting at the nursery (upper driveway) April – October. More info on in-person tours here. Or watch a new virtual tour! On a very hot and dry day in the summer of […]
How is OAEC dealing with the drought?
The old saying “Don’t miss the water ‘till the well runs dry” couldn’t be more apt in this year’s unprecedented drought. Wells and reservoirs are drying up around the county, the CA State Water Resources Control Board is implementing restrictions throughout the Russian River watershed, and neighboring small farms have been forced to cancel their […]
Kent Whealy Memorial Seed Collection
Pictured above: Doug Gosling, Mother Garden Biodiversity Program Director, in the OAEC seed vault with the new Kent Whealy dedication plaque. It is our great pleasure to announce the dedication and naming of the OAEC seed collection after seed preservation visionary and mentor, Kent Whealy. Kent Whealy recognized in the 1970’s that the collapse of […]
Congratulations Doug for 30 years at the Food Bank Garden!
For over 2 decades, OAEC has had a deep collaboration with Food For Thought (FFT), a food bank in Forestville that serves over 700 clients living with HIV/AIDS and other critical illnesses. After many years of volunteering with FFT, Doug Gosling, OAEC’s Mother Garden Biodiversity Program Director, helped to establish the garden there in 1999 and […]
OAEC at Bioneers
Join us at the Bioneers Conference – Oct 19th – 20th At the upcoming Bioneers Conference, OAEC’s Program Manager Cooper Freeman will discuss the evolutionary wheat breeding project he is leading on the panel: Evolutionary Plant Breeding: Breeding Crops for Climate Change, with project partner Leonard Diggs from Santa Rosa Junior College Shone Farm and journalist Mark […]
Nursery – only a few weeks left in the season!
Above: Of the two species of Patchouli grown for it’s essential oils, Java Patchouli is more common to find in cultivation and can be grown as a beautiful container plant, as a fast growing annual or as a perennial in the greenhouse. Patchouli was used during the silk trade to keep moths from laying their eggs […]
OAEC Nursery joins Fibershed
The OAEC Nursery is a new member of Fibershed, a consortium of growers, ranchers, artisans, and retailers working to create a culturally, socially, economically and ecologically viable local textile industry. Fibershed encourages the revival of local fiber systems through research, education and expanding markets for regenerative textile manufacturing from soil-to-soil. The OAEC Nursery is helping […]