The dream of a simpler, natural life speaks to a deep place in all of us. Modern-day homesteading is both an embrace of the past and a revolutionary act for the future. Urban and suburban life can feel shallow and disconnected. Learning to live with the land in our homesteading classes brings meaning, purpose and empowerment.
Grow your interconnected, land-based life with our homesteading classes
In-person Classes
Women's Basic Carpentry
This class is intended to get ladies up-to-speed on basic building skills, working with wood, and using hand tools as well as power tools. Focus is placed on ... creating a safe, comfortable, relaxed and fun learning environment in which students with beginning to intermediate skill levels can thrive. Trans welcome.
Choose a 2025 session:
- Apr 3-6,
- Apr 24-27,
- May 15-18,
- Jun 2-5 or
- Jul 24-27
Join the WAITLIST to be the first to know when this class opens up for enrollment.
You'll also receive our newsletters
Tiny House Building Workshop
Gain the skills you need to build your own tiny house from local, natural, or conventional materials. Tour beautifully crafted tiny houses and natural buildings, ... learn about each stage of building from expert lectures, experience hands-on learning as we build a tiny house from scratch, plus get lifetime access to extensive online video library
Choose a 2025 session:
- Apr 28 to May 7,
- May 22-31 or
- Jun 19-28
Join the WAITLIST to be the first to know when this class opens up for enrollment.
You'll also receive our newsletters
Foraging and Medicinal Herbs Course
Identify and wild forage medicinal plants in the Appalachian mountains. Learn to make medicine and cultivate herbs in your garden. Make ... and take home herbal salves, tinctures, flower essences, decoctions, cough syrups, herbal liqueurs, oxymels and vinegars.
- May 8-11
Join the WAITLIST to be the first to know when this class opens up for enrollment.
You'll also receive our newsletters
Timber Framing Class
Learn how to lay out, measure, cut, fit, assemble, and raise a 16' by 20' timber-framed building through demos and hands-on practice. This class is appropriate ... whether you are an experienced carpenter, backyard deck builder, or excited beginner who just has a knack for craft.
- Jun 14-21
Join the WAITLIST to be the first to know when this class opens up for enrollment.
You'll also receive our newsletters
Women’s Rewilding Retreat
Gather with other women for a long weekend of connection, learning, and rewilding. Basketry, medicine making, cheese and soap ... making, wild foods cookery, friction fire, and more In the mountains near Asheville, NC.
- May 28 to Jun 1
Join the WAITLIST to be the first to know when this class opens up for enrollment.
You'll also receive our newsletters
4-Month Carpentry Program
Get confident building for yourself and others. Our hands-on carpentry program is non-residential and takes place at Wild Abundance, located near Asheville, NC. It’s ... appropriate for beginning to intermediate level builders; no experience is necessary, just enthusiasm and a willingness to learn by doing. If you do have experience, there will be plenty of depth and advanced skills to dive into.
Choose a 2025 session:
- Mar 11 to Jul 2 or
- Jul 22 to Nov 20
Join the WAITLIST to be the first to know when this class opens up for enrollment.
You'll also receive our newsletters
Adult Beginner Woodworking Class
Get deep satisfaction from learning carpentry In a culture that’s zooming toward virtual reality and digitizing the day-to-day, not everyone grows up learning ... how to use tools and work with their hands. Our woodworking class for beginners and folks who have used tools, but don’t feel totally comfortable with them is here to change that. No matter your lifestyle, you surely interact with physical objects like shelves, chairs, tables. Learning carpentry can be rewarding and satisfying whether you want to build for yourself, feel confident fixing things around the house, or interacting with folks you hire in a confident way
- Sep 26-29, 2024
- Monthly or one time payment options available
- Secure checkout
- Flexible refund policy
- Sliding scale pricing based on income
Permaculture Design Certificate Course
This permaculture class empowers students to become effective ecological designers and planners. You will ... come out of this class with deep knowledge about creating forest gardens, ecology, permaculture principles, plant species and variety choices, holistic forestry, and more.
Join the WAITLIST to be the first to know about next year's class sessions
You'll also receive our newsletters
Online Classes
Take a step closer to your dream of a self-sufficient homestead
Only a few generations ago, most people grew up in roughly the same place as their great-grandparents. Back then, children learned from older family members how to contribute skillfully to the homestead. But nowadays, things are a bit different. Few of us were raised with extended family around. It’s common for children to focus on book learning at school; they may never wield a shovel, hoe or hammer as part of their education.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t, as adults, renew our relationships with self sufficiency. Our homesteading classes grew out of a love for practical skills and the desire to make learning these skills accessible in a culture that has virtually abandoned them. We are here to welcome you back to your roots and to build a sustainable future together.
You may wonder what sorts of skills you need to live your dream of a self-sufficient homestead? Our instructors have been experimenting with this vision for decades. You can learn a lot from their experience in our homesteading classes. As a result you’ll be able to get started with your own project on solid footing.
Our classes combine traditional Earth-based living with the modern language of permaculture design
We believe that permaculture design and principles are incredibly useful tools when it comes to homesteading. Our traditional, 12-day Permaculture Design Course teaches them through lots of hands-on learning, site visits and a theoretical foundation. In our experience living with the land, permaculture and earthskills enrich one another. This is why we also offer an intensive Permaculture Design Certificate Immersion with more than 100 additional hours of instruction, focused on Earth-based skills and rewilding.
Wild and cultivated plants are the stars of our homesteading classes
Getting to know the plants around you is important for every homesteader. We are out-of-the-closet plant nerds. Botanical education works its way into all of our homesteading classes.
If the green world is what draws you most, we also offer an wildcrafting class where you’ll learn all about wildcrafting and making medicines from healing plants. Both of our permaculture courses go deep into both wild and cultivated plant allies, too. Our gardening apprenticeship takes things a step further. Of all our homesteading classes, it provides the most hands-on experience with plants in the fields, woods, and garden.
Self sufficient living depends on diverse abilities, including practical and natural building skills
Everyone needs carpentry and building skills. Whether you hope to build your own home, renovate one, or just do your own maintenance and repairs, learning carpentry is important. One of our homesteading classes is a tiny house workshop that covers so much more than the basics. It’s 8 full days long and weaves in natural and sustainable materials, along with design and traditional building skills. The course is just one aspect of our tiny house apprenticeship, which includes room and board, plus individualized guidance in building, permaculture and just about everything we do here.
For female-bodied people who may not feel comfortable with hand and power tools yet, our women’s carpentry course will get you up to speed. We offer two levels: basic and advanced. The difference is that we dive into structural building in the advanced class.
Homesteading workshops help us reclaim the practical skills that have sustained our ancestors for generations
Homesteading is all about being resourceful. That means learning how to use what you have at hand. When your homestead includes raising livestock and/or hunting, the knowledge of how to use the whole animal is crucial. That’s why we teach you how to tan a hide so that you can make the best quality leather right on your homestead. You can see that our homesteading classes cover both the macro and the micro levels of sustainable living. As a result, we provide you with the skills you need to make your dreams a reality.