This is the first class in a season-spanning series “Growing Your Own Food: Beyond the Basics,” a follow-up to our extremely popular primer to “Growing Your Own Food” offered in 2011. The classes are designed to take your gardening endeavors to the next level, offering special topics such as elegant kitchen garden design, cultivating and preparing edible flowers, growing shiitake mushrooms, selecting heirloom varieties, and saving seeds. For an overview of the entire series, click here.

Available as individual workshops or as a package at a discounted rate of $210 members/$245 non-members (register below), this series is perfect for people looking for creative ways to enrich their kitchen gardening experience this year.

Class Description: Beyond Tomtoes and Cukes

Ready to expand the variety of choices from your kitchen garden? Lettuce and radishes are all very well, but did you know that some of your other favorite foods like garlic, artichokes, eggplant, asparagus, sweet potatoes, arugula, and parsnips can be grown right here in Maine? Brendan McQuillen of Morning Dew Farm in Newcastle will teach you how to bring more variety to your kitchen garden. Bring an open mind and learn some resources, tips and techniques for growing some new foods at home this year!

Brendan McQuillen has been farming at Morning Dew Farm in Newcastle for 10 years, growing a wide variety of MOFGA-certified organic vegetables. He is committed to preserving the unique flavors of heritage vegetables in danger of being lost in an age of commercialized agriculture. He has just returned from Oaxaca, Mexico, with a trove of indigenous pepper seeds which he plans to share with midcoast Maine.

Where:     Bosarge Family Education Center
Prices:      $30 members, $37 non-members; series price: $210/$245 (Pre-registration required)

TO REGISTER FOR THE ENTIRE SERIES, “GROWING YOUR OWN: BEYOND THE BASICS,” CLICK ON THE FIRST BUTTON, IMMEDIATELY BELOW:

CLICK ON THE BUTTON BELOW TO REGISTER FOR THIS CLASS, “BEYOND TOMATOES AND CUKES: NEW FOODS TO TRY IN YOUR GARDEN THIS YEAR:”