Silver Branch Permaculture

Permaculture Roots - Soil, Gardens, Food! - Hillsborough, NC
2026-05-02 09:30 - 17:30 (America/New_York) | Jubilee Healing Farm, 1009 Hi Mar Ln, Hillsborough, NC, 27278, United States
Learn how to grow food and tend land in a Permaculture way!

Learn a Permaculture approach to gardening, building soil, and resilient, climate-adapted food.

Here’s a little video I created to share a bit of what Permaculture is to me.

This 1-day Saturday workshop will leave you with a practical understanding of how to integrate Permaculture practices into your land and life.

We’ll learn simple approaches to working with nature that set Permaculture apart from most conventional gardening and farming.

Whether you’re entirely new to Permaculture or have explored it for yourself, these workshops will be sure to teach you something helpful to deepen your relationship with land and give you confidence to grow wild and nutritious food in the Piedmont while leaving the land more diverse and alive.

Topics:

Intro to Permaculture Design

How and Where to Begin!

Working With the Soils and Changing Climate of the NC Piedmont

Where to Put a Garden

Building Good Soil Without Buying Stuff

Growing Low-Input, Low-Maintenance Food

Food From Trees

Cover Crops, Sheet Mulching, and Other No-Till Techniques

Simple Explanation of Permaculture Guilds and Polycultures

Locally Adapted Perennial Vegetables

Growing with (Some) Shade and Why Full Sun Isn’t Always the Best

20+ Underappreciated Plants for Your Permaculture Garden

Hands-On Permaculture Practice

…Plus answering your Permaculture questions

Each workshop in this series will include opportunities to connect with nature and our senses, learn Permaculture design, answer your questions, and meet other amazing humans interested in Permaculture.

Venue and Workshop Details:

Our workshop is held at Jubilee Healing Farm – a beautifully tended small farm located on 10 acres in Hillsborough, NC that supports volunteer and community-building activities and workshops for people seeking healing.

We’ll have the workshop part inside and part outside unless the weather disagrees! Please wear comfortable clothing for the day. If it’s going to rain a little, bring rain gear. A little rain is very helpful for Permaculture design!

We’ll likely do a little forest walking. Good to wear compatible footwear. If you’re concerned about ticks or other itchy expressions of the local ecology, please bring non-toxic insect deterrent.

What to Bring:

Notebook and pen

Your own lunch and any snacks you need (kitchen available to heat up food)

Water bottle

Seeds or plants to swap if you have any you want to share.

Also:

Openness to different ways of seeing and living

Kindness towards the plants, animals, soil, water, and other people here

Inclusivity and welcoming spirit towards the people in the workshop

Willingness to put your phones away and tune into your senses

Curiosity about life and what each other and the land has to say

Sign-Up

We offer our tickets at a reduced rate for people experiencing significant financial need. Thank you for supporting this work.

Have a friend or loved one you want to bring to the workshop? Bring them and let me know and you’ll both get 15% off the ticket price.

About the Facilitator

Matthew “Watersong” Tracy started practicing Permaculture in 2011 and received his design certificate from Wild Abundance in 2015. He has been consulting and teaching as a Permaculture Designer since 2018.

Along the way, he learned from numerous Permaculture teachers, tended land with minimal inputs, worked with around 70 clients on their land, lived off-grid for a decade, and made (… and still makes!) a whole lot of humbling and valuable mistakes on his way back to life in harmony with the earth.

Matt is also an herbalist (…in training, like all herbalists..!) and has been putting strong-tasting plants in bottles to make helpful things happen since 2007. He prepares dozens of local herbal medicines for his community every year.

With all that experience, Matt is ever a beginner and student of the land. Nature is infinite. What can we do but listen and try?

Matt is honored to be a Permaculture guide to anyone interested in coming a little closer to the earth. Becoming a father in 2023 has made passing down these teachings that always consider future generations more important than ever.

Read the rest of Matt’s bio here.

Local Herbal Medicine - Hillsborough, NC
2026-05-23 09:30 - 17:30
Beginner-friendly and deep. Learn local herbal medicine making and the art of working with plants for health.

Herbal medicine is our original medicine. While many traditional herbal systems are immensely sophisticated and can be studied for a lifetime, plant medicine is also accessible to everyone as a folk tradition that empowers each person to support the health of their own bodies, families, and communities.

Like learning to grow food and build shelter, learning our local and accessible herbal medicines can give us a deeper sense of personal security and connection to the land. When we can turn to the plants growing right outside our door to give physical and psychological ease, it grows our resilience and our relationship to earth.

This day-long herbal medicine workshop is meant to empower you to begin making and working with herbal medicines. We’ll taste plants, visit plants, plant plants, learn plants, and make simple medicines to bring home. We’ll also give you the foundation to continue learning more of our local and useful medicinal plants on your own, helping you to feel safe exploring this beautiful and rewarding art with your own senses.

If you’ve dabbled in herbalism but haven’t yet learned about herbal energetics or our local plants, or if you feel overwhelmed by online information and intimidated by complex recipes and conflicting information, this workshop is for you! Total beginners are also fully welcome.

With the direct experience of how simple it can be to prepare these remedies and the knowledge of some of the best plants to begin with including many common local plants in the Piedmont, you’ll be taking the first steps on a long and ancient path towards health in harmony with the land.

Topics:

The simplest ways to make effective herbal medicines at home

Hands-on medicine making – come home with some to share!

Learning some of our local (and abundant!) herbal medicines

Growing some of the most helpful local herbal medicines in your garden

Understanding medicinal properties from tastes and other sensory cues

Demystifying “herbal energetics” – the heart of all holistic herbal systems

Learning about our constitutions, part of why plants can effect us so differently

Understanding why herbs may not have worked for you in the past

Working with herbs for psychological (and spiritual) well being

Herbal “first aid” and the simple everyday plants that can make life easier

Medicinal properties of our local abundant “invasive” plants

Cutting through influencer and wellness fads and dispelling bad advice

Phytochemistry and how to feel safe experimenting with plants

Non-rational ways of learning plants including dreaming and heart perception

The tradition of plants as teachers, and ways of learning from plants

…plus some wild, do-not-try-this-at-home herbal stories!

Venue and Workshop Details:

Our Saturday, May 23rd workshop will be held at Jubilee Healing Farm – a beautifully tended small farm located on 10 acres in Hillsborough, NC that supports volunteer and community-building activities and workshops for people seeking healing.

We’ll have the workshop part inside and part outside unless the weather disagrees! Please wear comfortable clothing for the day. If it’s going to rain a little, bring rain gear.

We’ll likely do a little forest walking. Good to wear compatible footwear. If you’re concerned about ticks or other itchy expressions of the local ecology, please bring non-toxic insect deterrent.

In this workshop, you’ll be invited (…never required!) to try small amounts of herbal medicines to learn their tastes and properties. Though we will choose plants and amounts meant to be safe for most bodies, please know your own sensitivities and err on the side of caution around any potential herb-drug interactions. We will not be offering any medical advice or prescribing anything. This is an educational experience.

What to Bring:

Journal and pen

Your own lunch and any snacks you need (kitchen available to heat up food)

Water bottle

Also:

Openness to different ways of seeing and living

Kindness towards the plants, animals, soil, water, and other people here

Inclusivity and welcoming spirit towards the people in the workshop

Willingness to put your phones away and tune into your senses

Curiosity about life and what each other and the land has to say

Sign-Up

This year, we’re offering sliding scale tickets at two different prices. Please only take a reduced price ticket if you are in significant financial need. Full-price tickets make it possible for us to continue this work. Thank you for your support.

About the Facilitator

Matthew “Watersong” Tracy started practicing Permaculture in 2011 and received his design certificate from Wild Abundance in 2015. He has been consulting and teaching as a Permaculture Designer since 2018.

Along the way, he learned from numerous Permaculture teachers, tended land with minimal inputs, worked with around 70 clients on their land, lived off-grid for a decade, and made (… and still makes!) a whole lot of humbling and valuable mistakes on his way back to life in harmony with the earth.

Matt is also a devoted herbalist (…in training, like all herbalists..!) and has been putting strong-tasting plants in bottles to make helpful things happen since 2007. He prepares dozens of local herbal medicines for his community every year and talks about medicinal herbs pretty much every single day. He’s learned from the wisdom of a great number of herbalists including Matthew Wood, Sajah Popham, Kat Maier, Katja Swift and others, and of course, from the plants!

With all his experience, Matt is ever a beginner and student of the land. Nature is infinite. What can we do but listen and try?

Matt is honored to be a Permaculture guide to anyone interested in coming a little closer to the earth. Becoming a father in 2023 has made passing down these teachings that always consider future generations more important than ever.

Read the rest of Matt’s bio here.

Creating a Food Forest - Hillsborough, NC
2026-06-13 09:30 - 17:30
Chapel Hill, NC (first half of day) and Hillsborough, NC (second half of day)

Food Forests are low-maintenance, edible oases of beauty and biodiversity. They build soil, support wildlife, and give healthy food year after year.

This workshop is focused on creating a Food Forest!

First, we’ll begin by touring Liane Salgado’s 15+-year old Food Forest / Forest Garden in Chapel Hill, NC. This is the most abundant and mature example of a food forest I know of in the entire Piedmont. This workshop gives a rare opportunity to learn from an established, local food forest.

One small part of Liane’s Chapel Hill Food Forest. It’s hard for photos to do a food forest justice. Just about every plant you see here provides food (as well as medicine, habitat, mulch, soil building, and so on…!). Fifteen years after Liane began, the Food Forest is a place for life beyond compare.

In the second half of the workshop, we’ll dive into theory and practice at the site of a newly planted food forest designed and planted in our workshops last year for Jubilee Healing Farm in Hillsborough, NC.

While we’re there, we’ll discuss and plant some of the understory and guild plants that bring more life to the food forest while learning about their growing conditions and uses. We’ll also dive into how to begin with your own food forest!

Topics:

Tour of a Successful Piedmont Food Forest

Food Forest / Forest Garden Theory and Design

How to Begin, and Where – Starting Steps for Food Forests

Laying Out a Food Forest Design From Pattern to Detail

Avoiding Common Food Forest Mistakes

Selecting the Right Plants for Our Climate and Sites

Strategies for Small Space Food Forests

Hands-On Work With Understory / Guild Food Forest Plants

Some Favorite Locally Adapted Edible Trees and Shrubs

50+ Food Forest Plant List

Your Food Forest / Forest Garden Questions

Venue and Workshop Details:

The first half of this workshop will be held in a 2-acre mature Food Forest in Chapel Hill. The second half will be at Jubilee Healing Farm, a beautifully tended small farm located on 10 acres in Hillsborough, NC that supports volunteer and community-building activities and workshops for people seeking healing. There will be a short drive between the spaces near lunch time.

We’ll have the workshop part inside and part outside unless the weather disagrees! Please wear comfortable clothing for the day. If it’s going to rain a little, bring rain gear. A little rain is very helpful for Permaculture design!

We’ll likely do a little forest walking. Good to wear compatible footwear. If you’re concerned about ticks or other itchy expressions of the local ecology, please bring non-toxic insect deterrent.

What to Bring:

Journal and pen

Your own lunch and any snacks you need (kitchen available to heat up food)

Water bottle

Also:

Openness to new (and ancient) ways of seeing and living

Kindness towards the plants, animals, soil, water, and other people here

Inclusivity and welcoming spirit towards the people in the workshop

Willingness to put your phones away and tune into your senses

Curiosity about life and what each other and the land has to say

Sign Up

This year, we’re offering tickets at a sliding scale and standard rates. Please only choose the reduced rate tickets if you truly need to. Thank you for the support that allows us to continue sharing this work!

About the Facilitator:

Matthew “Watersong” Tracy started practicing Permaculture in 2011 and received his design certificate from Wild Abundance in 2015. He has been consulting and teaching as a Permaculture Designer since 2018.

Along the way, he learned from numerous Permaculture teachers, tended land with minimal inputs, worked with around 70 clients on their land, lived off-grid for a decade, and made (… and still makes!) a whole lot of humbling and valuable mistakes on his way back to life in harmony with the earth.

Matt is also an herbalist (…in training, like all herbalists..!) and has been putting strong-tasting plants in bottles to make helpful things happen since 2007. He prepares dozens of local herbal medicines for his community every year.

With all that experience, Matt is ever a beginner and student of the land. Nature is infinite. What can we do but listen and try?

Matt is honored to be a Permaculture guide to anyone interested in coming a little closer to the earth. Becoming a father in 2023 has made passing down these teachings that always consider future generations more important than ever.

Read the rest of Matt’s bio here.
