Healing, Helpful, & Edible Southwest Native Plants: How to Harvest, Store, & Prepare California’s Southwest Native Plants

“Healing, Helpful, & Edible Southwest Native Plants”
 
How to Harvest, Store, & Prepare
California’s Southwest Native Plants

~with Robin Kobaly~
Botanist, Founder & President of The Power of Plants

3-Hour Workshop at Tree of Life Nursery

Saturday April 18, 2020 ~ 12:30 – 3:30 pm

This three-hour workshop offers a fascinating look at ancient and traditional uses of California native food and medicinal plants, and presents ways to adapt those uses to fit today’s needs. Find out why these powerful native plants’ survival strategies make them so useful to us today. Explore which native food and healing plants can be used successfully and safely, and explore the many other benefits of growing these amazing herbal remedies, edible harvests, and utilitarian providers in your own yard. This popular workshop includes demonstrations and samples, plus tips on identifying and growing each plant, as well as how to harvest native plant species in a respectful and sustainable way.

We invite you to experience our southwest native plants through an immersive approach — through smell, taste, touch, and sight — all with accounts of each plant’s special gifts and traditional powers that can be incorporated into modern-day life. Workshop participants will explore hardy and helpful wild California plants that can add richness to your kitchen, your medicine chest, your home, and your garden, as well as enhancing the lives of your neighborhood wildlife.

It’s fun learning how our native plants can serve as food, beverages, art, utensils, and healing remedies for humans. Each workshop is tailored to native plants that are in season at that time, so we can sample flower buds, blossoms, fruit, roots, shoots, and seeds that are ready for harvest at that time, as well as plants that have been dried or preserved from earlier seasons, just as our Native American ancestors did to add to their year-round pantries. You will look at our native plants with a new perspective after experiencing this comprehensive workshop.

 

 – Robin Kobaly –

Robin Kobaly is a botanist and plant ecologist with expertise in plant communities across the
Mojave, Sonoran and Southwest deserts. She is Executive Director of The SummerTree Institute, and
president and cofounder of The Power of Plants. Robin has degrees from the University of
California, Riverside, including a Bachelors Degree in Biology and a Masters Degree in Plant
Ecology.

Robin has over 30 years of experience in plant ecology, wildlife biology, land
use management, aerial photo interpretation, and natural history interpretation,
including work as a botanist for the federal government for 21 years.

Robin is author of a new book “The Desert Underground,” an illustrated,
virtual tour of the amazing living systems in our desert soils, which has been
very well received and popular.

Robin was awarded the 2018 Minerva Hoyt Conservation Award by Joshua
Tree National Park Association for her contributions to education, research, and
preservation of the California desert. She helped lead the effort to form the
newly designated Sand to Snow National Monument, was co-founder of The
Wildlands Conservancy, and served as preserve manager of Big Morongo
Canyon Preserve.