Are you serious about stewarding land as a part of your livelihood or lifestyle? Are you committed to both growing food and supporting ecological health? Our programs are designed to help provide the knowledge, skills, network, and resources you need to start or grow your vision. Whether you are already a landowner or land manager, or you are seeking a place to land, we encourage you to explore our offerings and reach out with any questions.
Regenerative Homesteading Intensive
Alternating Saturdays May 16-August 8th 8:00-1:30 + 6 Recorded Sessions
In the context of an increasingly instant, fast paced, and automated world, deciding to cultivate food for yourself, your family, and your community is a powerful commitment to a grounded, relational, and gratitude-rich way of life. This class is designed for those eager to live that reality or operate community-integrated farms and homesteads. It provides a hands-on, immersive dive into key ecological frameworks and how to use them to cultivate vegetables, staple crops, fruits, medicinal herbs, and pasture in systems integrated with livestock. Capped at 15 participants.
Facilitated Design Intensive
Tentative Dates: Alternating Saturdays 8:00am-12:00pm Sept 5th-Nov 14th
Learn ecological design by walking through a 24-hour facilitated design process on one of our partner sites. This process will teach you strategies for observing the landscape and conducting site assessment, how to align farm systems with your goals and management capacity, how to make key design decisions that unite goals with landscape health, and how to create detailed designs that are ready to implement. You will learn how to use basic digital tools and online resources to find property information, map soil types, measure from satellite imagery, and create basic conceptual designs. We will also provide information and budget guidelines for sourcing plants, soil amendments, and other key materials. $5000 cost, capped at 8 participants. Geared towards participants who have taken a permaculture design course, regenerative homesteading intensive, or have some lived experience with permaculture-based farming or gardening.
Do you have a young project and need some support with design? Hosting a design intensive is a great way to develop a deeper understanding of your land and end up with an actionable master plan and invested cohort of co-designers. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss hosting this year’s intensive!
Mentorship & Implementation Support
Getting a project off the ground can be daunting. We are offering a retainer of 4 hours per month of support through your first growing season (8 months), for you to use however you choose. We can support you with project implementation, specific farm skills or activities, planning, materials acquisition, managing volunteers, setting up back-end systems, etc… For in-person consultation, drive time will be included for distances over 10 miles from Niwot.
Cost: $3000 annual fee
A La Carte Permaculture Design Certification
Sometimes a full permaculture design course can feel daunting. If getting a certification is important to you, it is possible to combine participation in the following programs to receive a permaculture design certification through PINA. This allows you to pick and choose which pieces are most appropriate for you, and space them (or cram them all together!) to fit your schedule*.
Niwot Homestead Volunteer Membership: Hands-On Skills
You must attend at least 8 full volunteer days at the Niwot Homestead to achieve a certification. Becoming a volunteer member for the year is the easiest way to do this and provides you with first priority registration for all 38 annual volunteer days. This is a flexible, accessible way to participate in the hands-on activities that interest you most on the days when you are available.
Regenerative Homesteading Intensive: Theory & Implementation
This course covers the key concepts of a permaculture design course, uniting those concepts with hands-on implementation experience.
Facilitated Design Intensive: Ecological Design
This course will both cover the permaculture design process and give you a chance to complete your own site design as required by the PINA curriculum.
*Though it is our hope and intention to run all of these courses each year, we are not currently able to guarantee that all of them will be offered annually. Please take that into account if you are considering pursuing a certification!
If you are registering for any of the above programs with the intention of gaining a permaculture design certification, please let us know so we can support you on that journey!