connecting people and plants
for a resilient future
NOW TAKING ORDERS
Fast Track Your Food Forest Workshops
'Fast Track Your Food Forest' is a series of hands-on workshops held across Northland and beyond.
In these sessions you’ll learn how to design, establish, and manage a syntropic food forest that evolves quickly, produces abundance, and regenerates the land rather than depleting it.
Whether you’re starting from pasture or grass, or retrofitting an existing orchard or garden, the same underlying principles apply. We’ll guide you through the key practices that allow natural systems to work with you - accelerating growth, improving soil health, and creating resilient, productive landscapes.
These workshops are ideal for landowners, gardeners, community projects and anyone wanting to build thriving food systems.
Fast Track Your Food Forest – 2026
A sequence of three one-day trainings, spaced to support real-world action.
Session 1 — Principles and Site Design
-
Core principles of syntropic agroforestry
-
Reading your site: light, water, soils, succession
-
Designing for fast establishment and long-term resilience
Session 2 — Management and Propagation
-
How mature syntropic systems are managed
-
Pruning, timing, and system acceleration
-
Access to plant material and propagation strategies
Session 3 — Installation Day
-
Refining your design based on real conditions
-
Planting a syntropic food forest together
-
Practical decisions that determine success or struggle
There is also the possibility of shaping a training day around your own land or project.
Workshop Facilitators
Arthur McInnes
In my early 20s, while figuring out what to do with my life and noticing the direction the world was heading, I realised I needed to answer two questions: what am I most passionate about, and what is the most valuable contribution I could make? The answer I came to was connecting people with the land through agroforestry and food forests - increasing resilience, producing abundance, and deepening our connection with place.
Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to learning from others, experimenting on my own land, growing and supplying plants through Twin Falls Nursery, and now teaching the Fast Track Your Food Forest workshops. Working with James Andrews and James Samuel over the past year has been deeply rewarding, and I look forward to another season of learning, sharing, and building real, living systems together.
James Samuel
Two things will help us transition through turbulent times. One is the establishment of vibrant local food economies which are not reliant on external inputs, and which create healthy ecosystems and yield nourishing food. The other is learning to navigate feelings for the intelligence they offer, and emotions for their healing potential, so we are not thrown off balance when challenges arise that test our capacity to collaborate, as we build a new form of society.
James Samuel can be found online at growingradicles.org
James Andrews
What I love about holding space for the Fast track your food forest workshops with James Samuel and Arthur McInnes is that I get to rave about how the principles of ecology can be utilised by every day folk in simple ways to create nourishment for our stomachs, as well as our hearts and souls. There are any number of starting points available for creating the world you want to live in rather than complaining about the one you were given and growing forests of food is possibly the most delicious.
James Andrews can be found online at jamesandrews.co.nz