University of Illinois

Field Day

- Stelle Tour -

Thursday September 25, 2008

Tour Hours: 10:00 A.M. - 3:00 P.M.

The Center For Sustainable Community (CSC) is partnering with the University of Illinois to offer this first-hand opportunity to experience sustainability applications in action. The tour begins at the CSC office at the Stelle Community Center and highlights some of Stelle's most popular sustainable agriculture features in a four hour guided tour/presentation

Price: $20 Includes Lunch

Featured Events:

Harry Carr
(click on photos to enlarge)

10:00 - 11:45 Raising Grass-Based Food - Talk and Meadow Tour
Join Harry Carr for an insightful presentation on how grass-based food production can improve our diets, reduce our environmental impact, and restore depleted soils. Harry will describe how animals, primarily ruminants such as sheep and cattle, convert the sun's energy into healthy foods by grazing and digesting nature's storehouse of grasses and legumes. He will describe the health benefits of milk and meat from grass fed animals - for example, how high levels of heart healthy Omega-3 fatty acids are produced - and much more. Tour Mint Creek Farm's legume based meadows and rotational grazing system. Please meet at the CSC office in Stelle, where the tour will begin.

Greenhouse Bed and Breakfast

12:00 Noon - Lunch will be prepared by Chef Guia Hoffman of the Greenhouse Bed and Breakfast.
Menu: mixed green salad with two home-made dressings, seafood-vegetable soup, chicken-almond-orange sandwich on home-made bread, with fruit pizza for dessert. Mint tea.

A guild of oregano and eggplant underneath a persimmon tree. This guild maximizes harvest of sunlight to simultaneously produce three crops.

1:00 to 2:00 P.M. Permaculture Introduction Seminar
This presentation will give an overview of the principles of permaculture design and show examples of permaculture systems you can use on your own property. As the highlight of the talk, Mark will give a tour of the yard at the Greenhouse B&B where he and his wife Guia have built permaculture principles into their organic-gardening system. While the examples exhibited in the tour are focused on garden and orchard applications, this introductory talk will cover permaculture principles as applied to many other aspects of an ecosystem, especially the role of humans in that ecosystem. Click here to see some examples of permaculture application in the yard at their bed and breakfast. Handout provided.

Stelle's Chicken 'Alamo'.

2:00 - 3:00 CSC Garden, Orchard and Poultry Tour
Bill Land, CSC's Property Manager, will lead this workshop. Bill will present a hands-on approach valuable for individuals interested in organic gardening, orchard production and chicken management.

The workshop will be taught outdoors featuring first the demonstration gardens developed by Bill with assistance from Stelle community residents. Bill will cover the following garden topics :

The use of hard winter rye as a cover crop
Compost utilization
A plot using living mulch
Cardboard and mulch plots
Vertical gardening
Maintaining healthy perennials
Shade cropping
Companion planting
Permaculture glades

The Stelle Orchard
The orchard area tour will include information useful to individuals developing fruit orchards and bramble fruit. Topics to be covered with the assistance of Argena Marie include:

Proper seasonal pruning of young and mature trees
Use of Azomite in the orchard
Planting and care of Austrees
Organic pest control for an organic orchard
Transplanting and care of bramble fruit
Weed and grass control in the orchard

Stelle's Chicken ' Alamo'
The poultry project will include a tour of the renovated ' Alamo' building, and showing off the Chicken Co-op’s flock of Buff Orpingtons. Poultry topics include:

Use of brooders to expand the flock
Poultry pen within a pen complex
Woodland thicket for free range
Use of kitchen organic refuse as a food supplement
Use of chicken tractors for raising young birds
Rain water catchment

Click here to register online.

*Tour begins at 10:00 A.M. in the CSC office in Stelle.*

Click Here for Directions and Maps to Stelle and the CSC office