Hot Bed Growing Workshop @ St. Francis Food Forest

Join us for a free workshop at St. Francis Food Forest on the ancient practice of HOT BED growing - using freely available organic matter from your local community to create compost-powered heat to grow food all year around (including tropical and hot climate crops)!

This simple low-tech method (basically building a massive hot compost pile, topping off with soil and then planting veg on top) can extend your growing season by months in the spring/autumn and allow you to grow herbs and salads all through the winter. On top of that, at the end of the growing/composting process you can harvest tonnes of rich living compost!

We will be building a new hot bed from scratch, as well as planting on top of a readymade hot bed - so we’ll get to see and do both stages of the process!

In this workshop we will:

1. learn how to construct a hot bed, what materials to add to it in what quantities/ratios and how to keep the pile aerated so it stays hot for longer

2. how to maintain a hot bed 

3. what crops to grow on your hot bed

4. learn and share with each other how and where to source free organic matter from to fuel your hot bed

Feel free to bring along any of your own compostable materials or stuff you can source from your neighbourhood to contribute to the hot bed e.g. raw fruit and veg scraps, coffee grounds, brown cardboard, animal manure (not from cats and dogs!), grass cuttings, hops and barley waste etc.!

The workshop is offered to the public for free to promote this method and spread regenerative food-growing and composting methods (and the circular economy of fertility and microbes) between the two. We are a community run project, any donation after the workshop would be very gratefully received help us grow our capacity to produce compost, demonstrate and teach its uses and applications. We will share a donation link

We will also have the pleasure of being joined by masters students from the Camberwell College + Kyoto Institute of Arts' Global Collaborative Design Practice course, who will be serving us herbal teas from plants grown in the St. Francis Food Forest at their beautifully crafted tea stall!

Accessibility, venue and what to bring

• St. Francis Food Forest is a community composting and food-growing project in St. Francis Park, a public park run by South London Urban Growers. Our site is just inside the entrance to the park on Abbotswood Road SE22 8DB, opposite the Diamond Dulwich Car Wash. (Look for our three big charred compost bays)
• What3words location https://w3w.co/bliss.valid.jars
• We are 5 mins walk from East Dulwich train station and 2 mins from the bus stops on Dog Kennel Hill and the Sainsburys store next door.
• Please call Ben on 07757268809 on the day if you have any trouble finding us
• The nearest toilets are in the big Sainsburys store (3 minute walk)
• The site is wheelchair accessible, but be aware we are on a deep wood chip surface that is a little soft and uneven. There will be some log seating and chairs for those who would like to sit
  
• Bring drinking water, there is no running water on the site
• We will have tea, coffee, herbs, refreshments, snacks and all the equipment you need for the workshop, plus an outdoor shelter if we get rain
• Wear sturdy shoes and bring gardening gloves if you can (we have some if not)
• Any other questions feel free to get in touch beforehand!