Beth Covert leans over a large table covered by butcher paper and scoops a softball-sized chunk of soil from a bucket near her feet. With practiced hands, she adds tiny seeds to the dark grey earth, blending and molding them into the dirt mixture while explaining to a small group of rapt onlookers that today she’ll help them make wildflower bombs for guerrilla gardening.
Covert is one of over a dozen instructors who lead workshops and classes at School of Ranch, a nonprofit launched in 2022 to bring together people throughout Central Oregon interested in learning new skills to support their modern-day homesteading goals. The classes are wide-ranging, including everything from soap making to animal husbandry, carpentry and food preservation.
On this Saturday morning, Covert is part of a small team from School of Ranch providing free workshops to the public at the last farmer’s market of the season in Sisters. The wildflower bomb lesson is a collaboration with Worthy Environmental, a nonprofit that advocates for conservation and natural and science education.
Mark Gross, the founder and executive director of School of Ranch, says collaborations like the one with Worthy Environmental, along with free-community events, are key to the organization’s goals of bringing together people from diverse backgrounds and beliefs.
Gross started the nonprofit a year after he and his wife moved to a 10-acre ranch in Terrebonne, and he realized that watching how-to videos online to tackle projects around the property wouldn’t cut it.
“You can’t learn how to use a chainsaw on YouTube,” Gross said, chuckling. “The being live and face-to-face with a human is key.”
Over the last two years, through classes and workshops in spaces around Central Oregon, School of Ranch has taught over 1,000 students. And, according to Gross’ estimates, about 30% of enrollees in classes are repeat attendees.
Local experts lead the classes, and students are charged per class. The class payments, Gross said, go to the instructors and cover the cost of class materials. About a third goes back to School of Ranch for marketing. Other than three paid high school interns there are no paid staff members, Gross said.
Beyond teaching skills, Gross hopes that the workshops will lead to deeper community change. “It’s creating common ground in our society today,” he said.
This article appears in Source Weekly November 7, 2024.
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