Citizen Science: Living Soils, Growing Food

Use regenerative growing practices in your own garden

Learn about the challenges facing our food and farming systems and solutions to overcome them. Explore key approaches to food growing that can regenerate soils and ecosystems. You’ll discover sustainable practices and will be guided through the steps to design your own growing experiments to assess how effective these are in your own space. This year the course also covers how to move from data to action, and will introduce you to participatory governance. We will offer practical information on how to create positive change in your garden, local area and beyond using citizen-generated data.

This course has been designed for anyone interested in the environment. You don’t need any special experience, but it might be of interest to small farmers, community and urban growers, gardeners, land managers, allotment growers, and teachers in environment-related subjects.

As part of the course you will have the opportunity to join the new GROW Citizen Observatory. You do not need any particular tools or resources to take part in the course, but we recommend you have access to some space for food growing. If you do not have access to a garden or growing site, you are encouraged to identify a plot of land (it does not have to be big) in which you can carry out the activities. This could be your local community garden or farm, or maybe a neighbour’s garden who might be interested in learning more about soil and food growing with you.

You won’t require any special equipment for this course. For some of the activities you will need easily available tools such as a shovel or a measuring tape. All the tools required will be detailed in the relevant sections of the course.