Zenger Farm
Welcome to Zenger Farm
We are a working urban farm that models, promotes and educates about sustainable food systems, environmental stewardship, community development and access to good food for all.
Adult Workshops
We offer a variety of opportunities for adults and families to learn at the farm. Check out our upcoming workshops below. Unless otherwise noted, all workshops take place in the Zenger Farmhouse at 11741 SE Foster Rd. If you would like to learn while lending a hand, take a look at our volunteer opportunities.
Teaching a Workshop
Are you interested in offering a workshop at the farm? Please contact Prairie at prairie@zengerfarm.org or 503-282-4245.
Scholarships
We want everyone to be able to attend our workshops, regardless of income level. If you cannot afford the full workshop price, please fill out a scholarship application and send it in with your registration form. We will make every effort to meet your need. If you have questions, call us at 503.282.4245. Would you like to donate to our scholarship fund? Click here.
Upcoming Workshops
Intro to Backyard Beekeeping
Saturday, February 27th (1pm-3pm)
Join the Zenger Farm Beekeepers to learn the basics of backyard beekeeping. Learn about city regulations, bee needs as well as the various hive options, equipment needed, and seasonal tasks. If weather (and bees) permit, we will be taking a closer look at the Zenger Farm hives. Instructor Matt Reed co-founded Bee Thinking in 2008,as an internet resource for beekeepers throughout the world. Bee Thinking is the largest foundationless horizontal top bar and Warre hive store in the world, focused on providing our customers with the high-quality, sustainably built products at reasonable prices. When not reading about beekeeping, building hives or talking the ear off anyone who will listen, Matthew spends his days as an IT Manager for a local software company. Instructor Laura Dalton has been teaching fabrication and running the sculpture shop for Reed College for 9 years. Laura has led community workshops in the past on power tool safety, chicken tractor construction, and building top bar hives. She also helped to found and run the North Portland Tool Library in Kenton. Currently Laura urban homesteads in North Portland with honeybees, chickens, garden and a tiny orchard, and hopes to have her own real farm someday.
Cost: $35
Intro to Backyard Chicken Keeping
Saturday, March 6th (10am-12pm)
Craig Clark, the chicken expert of the Eastside Egg Cooperative, will teach you the basics of backyard chicken keeping, covering raising chicks, shelter, feed, municipal regulations and which chicken breed is right for you.
Cost: $20
Sausage Making
Saturday, March 13th (1pm-4pm)
Lyonnaise, Tuscan, Boudin, Italian, Cotecino and Meguez. Learn to make your favorite sausage or perhaps something new. . . Mexican Green, Thai Pork, Crab or Lemongrass chicken. Instructor Linda Colwell is a classically trained chef with a thirty year culinary history devoted to local producers, restaurants, markets and school districts. She mastered butchery and charcuterie at Salumeria di Carlo and has raised and butchered pigs on Sauvie Island. Linda is the founder of the Garden of Wonders, Abernethy Scratch Kitchen, and is the founding Director of Eat Think Grow which supports Portland Public Schools in meeting its Wellness Policy through Farm to School and School Garden Education. Linda farms 1000 sq. ft in Portland and works on a 145-acre organic farm in the Willamette Valley. Linda believes that an understanding of how food is grown, its transformation in the kitchen and its place at the table are essential life skills.
Cost: $50
Intro to Backyard Beekeeping
Saturday, March 20th (1pm-3pm)
Join the Zenger Farm Beekeepers to learn the basics of backyard beekeeping. Learn about city regulations, bee needs as well as the various hive options, equipment needed, and seasonal tasks. If weather (and bees) permit, we will be taking a closer look at the Zenger Farm hives. Instructor Matt Reed co-founded Bee Thinking in 2008,as an internet resource for beekeepers throughout the world. Bee Thinking is the largest foundationless horizontal top bar and Warre hive store in the world, focused on providing our customers with the high-quality, sustainably built products at reasonable prices. When not reading about beekeeping, building hives or talking the ear off anyone who will listen, Matthew spends his days as an IT Manager for a local software company. Instructor Laura Dalton has been teaching fabrication and running the sculpture shop for Reed College for 9 years. Laura has led community workshops in the past on power tool safety, chicken tractor construction, and building top bar hives. She also helped to found and run the North Portland Tool Library in Kenton. Currently Laura urban homesteads in North Portland with honeybees, chickens, garden and a tiny orchard, and hopes to have her own real farm someday.
Cost: $35
Worm Composting (Family Friendly)
Saturday, March 27th (10am-12pm)
At this hands-on workshop you will learn how to turn your food scraps into garden compost using red wiggler worms. Learn everything you need to know about worm composting AND build your own worm bin to take home, full of red wiggler worms (a $40 value)! Child care provided. Children can join parents, or participate in our fun kids activities.
Cost: $40
Real Coq au Vin (Chicken slaughter and butcher) with Portland Meat Collective
WORKSHOP IS FULL!
Saturday, March 27th (2pm-6pm)
In this course, each student will learn how to kill their own rooster, and how to butcher it in preparation for making coq au vin. Once they have acquired these skills, they'll learn how to cook coq au vin using this kind of rooster versus the more conventional organic chickens that are sold at retail butchers around town. At the end of the course, the class will sit down to a meal of good red wine, coq au vin, and other homemade French treats.
Instructor Camas Davis, an Oregon native, was a magazine writer and editor in New York and Portland for a decade before she decided to switch gears and work with meat and learning butchery. Camas is the founder of the Portland Meat Collective, an organization that's part meat CSA, part meat buying resource hub, and part travelling butchery school. The Portland Meat Collective will officially launch this spring. Instructor Levi Cole, an Oregon native, is a critical care nurse by day, but he is also a self-taught butcher, cook, and urban homesteader who raises his own bees, kills his own chickens, plants his own vegetable gardens, cures his own pancetta, and slaughters and butchers his own meat each year.
Cost: $75
Easy Home Curing with Portland Meat Collective
Saturday, April 24th (2pm-6pm)
Learn how to make your own pancetta and corned beef. Students will learn which cuts of meat are best to use for each curing process, where to find such cuts, which spices and smoking techniques to use, how dry versus wet curing works, and how to ensure your cured meat comes out tasting good. Each student will go home with a sizeable portion of tied and spiced pancetta that's ready to be aged at home. They will also go home with their own cured beef, which will need to be aged in their refrigerator for a few weeks before its final preparation. The class will end with a meal of corned beef and cabbage, pancetta-spiked salad, and good wine.
Instructor Camas Davis, an Oregon native, was a magazine writer and editor in New York and Portland for a decade before she decided to switch gears and work with meat and learning butchery. Camas is the founder of the Portland Meat Collective, an organization that's part meat CSA, part meat buying resource hub, and part travelling butchery school. The Portland Meat Collective will officially launch this spring. Instructor Levi Cole, an Oregon native, is a critical care nurse by day, but he is also a self-taught butcher, cook, and urban homesteader who raises his own bees, kills his own chickens, plants his own vegetable gardens, cures his own pancetta, and slaughters and butchers his own meat each year.
Cost: $75
Worm Composting (Family Friendly)
Saturday, May 15th (10am-12pm)
At this hands-on workshop you will learn how to turn your food scraps into garden compost using red wiggler worms. Learn everything you need to know about worm composting AND build your own worm bin to take home, full of red wriggler worms (a $40 value)! Child care provided. Children can join parents, or participate in our fun kids activities.
Cost: $40
Pie Baking
Sunday, May 16th (2pm-4pm)
Learn the secrets of flaky, fool-proof pie crust in this hands-on class lead by award-winning pie baker and Zenger Farm board member, Marie Johnson. Bakers will discuss pie successes and challenges, the relative merits of different ingredients and methods, then roll up your sleeves and try out your new knowledge. Each baker will take away your own pie crust, ready to fill and bake at home, along with a pastry blender and set of yummy pie recipes. Pie and beverages will be served. Please bring an apron, if you have one. All other supplies will be provided. Inspired by her grandmother and the desire to bring back the nurturing powers of home-baked goodness, Marie has been making pies from scratch for over 20 years. Her old-fashioned, back-to-basics pies won multiple awards at Natures fresh Northwest (predecessor to New Seasons Markets). This class is an encore of the popular class Marie taught last fall.
Cost: $35
Past Workshops
Basic Butchery with the Portland Meat collective
Saturday, February 20th (1pm-5pm)
Learn the lost art of home butchery from Adam Sappington, owner of Country Cat Dinnerhouse and Bar, assisted by the Portland Meat Collective's Camas Davis. Learn how to split two sides of pork into primals, and how to cut those primals into cookable cuts like ribs, tenderloins, ham roasts and shoulder roasts. The class will also include tips on how to cook various cuts, and everyone will go home with $100 worth of meat!
Adam Sappington is the chef and owner of Country Cat Dinnerhouse and Bar in Portland. Before opening his own restaurant he was a chef at Wildwood, and is one of the first chefs in Portland to practice whole animal butchery in restaurants over a decade ago. Camas Davis, an Oregon native, was a magazine writer and editor in New York and Portland for a decade before she decided to switch gears and work with meat and learning butchery. Camas is the founder of the Portland Meat Collective, an organization that is part meat CSA, part meat resource hub, and part travelling butchery school, that will officially launch this spring.
Cost: $200
Hands-On Fruit Tree Pruning
Saturday, January 30th (10am-12pm)
Limited to 10 people! Learn basic pruning and training skills in our diverse orchard. We have both young and old trees of many varieties, including 50 trees planted last year. Class includes small group instruction and plenty of hands on practice. Small size means lots of individual instruction and time for questions.
John Iott has over 10 years of experience caring for fruit trees. His appreciation of Fruit Culture started in the Chadwick Garden, Santa Cruz, CA, has taken him to a 5-acre organic apple orchard in New Hampshire and a 40-acre organic walnut farm in California. He currently works with the City of Portland in the Community Gardens Program helping maintain 33 gardens within the city, including several 'urban orchards'.
Cost: $35
Organic Gardening
Saturdays, August 15, 2009 – September 19th, 2009 (10:00am to 12:30pm)
A workshop series introducing practical gardening skills through hands-on learning and small group instruction at Zenger Farm’s six-acre field and garden sites.
Taught by Ryan Hofrichter, whose six years of training and experience with plants spans small-scale farming and gardening, design, native plants and restoration, and botanical medicine.
Cost: $20 per class or $105 for all six classes
Home Dairying 101: Elements of Cheesemaking
Offered twice: Saturday, August 1st or Sunday, August 23rd (2:00pm to 4:00pm)
You can make your own cheese! This workshop will teach you how to make a simple, fresh cheese using standard kitchen utensils and ingredients.
Cost: $40
Patrick Barber has been making simple cheeses and cultured milk delicacies in his home kitchen for seven years. When he is not carefully bringing milk to a target temperature, he makes his living as a book designer.
Worm Composting 101 - Family Friendly!
Saturday, July 18th (10am-12pm)
At this hands-on one day workshop you'll learn how to turn your food scraps into garden compost using red wiggler worms. Learn everything you need know about worm composting at home AND take home your own worm bin and red wiggler worms! We'll provide child care.
Cost: $40 (includes your own take-home bin with worms, a $40 value!)
Taught by Elizabeth Bryant, Certified Master Composter and OSU Master Gardener.
Chickens 101
Tuesdays from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. Offered on the following dates: July 7th, July 21st, August 4th, August 18th
Learn how to raise your own backyard flock of laying hens from the experts of the Zenger Farm Eastside Egg cooperative. Instructors will cover the basics of raising chicks, shelter, feed, municipal regulations, and which chickens are right for you.
Cost: $20 per class
Instructors Patrick Barber and Holly McGuire started the Eastside Egg Co-operative at Zenger Farm in 2007. Instructor Craig Clark is a co-director of the co-op. Eastside Egg cares for 50 laying hens by sharing the work among 14 volunteer teams, and moving the flock from one vegetable field to another by way of an ingeniously designed mobile chicken coop.
Cook delicious, quick and nutritious meals from a well-stocked pantry
Thursdays, February 26th, March 5th and March 12th, 2009 6:00pm to 8:30pm
A three-week series on concepts, techniques and easy combinations to cook with what you have on hand. Classes will be interactive and include some hands on participation and demonstration. A full meal will be served and copies of recipes and additional materials are included. The class is appropriate for a range of experience levels.
Instructor Katherine Deumling is a regional governor for Slow Food USA and was the leader of Slow Food Portland until recently. She has studied food and culture in Italy and Mexico and grew up in Germany.
Read the full course description
Buying Food on a Budget
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
Find out how to save money, feed your family, and eat healthy while shopping at the grocery store. Offered at Lent School, in partnerhsip with Rose Community Development, Schools Uniting Neighborhoods, Porland Impact, Portland Public Schools, Multnomah County, Portland Parks and Recreation and the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization.
Crop Planning for Diverse Plantings:
How to effectively use spreadsheets to streamline the process
Saturday, November 7 OR Sunday, November 8 (1pm-4 pm)
Josh Volk, of Slow Hand Farm (slowhandfarm.com), will be teaching this course based on a system that he has been developing and refining for the past ten plus years.
Learn a refined crop planning and record keeping system, and general principles for creating your own systems. The crop planning system presented will let you plan out hundreds of separate plantings and keep track of all of them with minimal effort. If you are a professional grower and you want to save time, improve harvests, and keep better records, this is the course for you. If you are a serious gardener and want to grow as much food as possible, this is for you too.
The course will use excel style spread sheets extensively and also cover shortcuts and techniques for using spreadsheets more effectively and efficiently. All of the basic concepts are equally applicable to those still using pencil and paper - although you may be converted.