The Climate-Friendly Kitchen Garden  Course Starting March 2025

The Climate-Friendly Kitchen Garden Course offers practical, hands-on skills in urban gardening, cooking, composting, and basic building. This 8-month course will guide participants through the seasons, teaching them how to start their own garden, cook with seasonal ingredients, reduce waste and energy consumption, and build a supportive community.
The course is designed for city dwellers seeking to implement positive changes in their lifestyles. It provides practical skills in sustainable food practices, exploring the impact of food production and ways to reduce it, with a focus on taking concrete action in even the smallest spaces of city life.

WHAT IS COVERED IN THE COURSE

Urban gardening: How to start and maintain a small-scale garden, even in limited spaces like balconies or yards; planning a garden; how to choose the right plants for your space; companion planting and crop families; starting plants from seeds: Everything that you need to know to start and maintain your own garden!

Climate-friendly cooking: Plant-based cooking with seasonal, locally sourced ingredients; reducing food waste; exploring various food preservation techniques such as fermentation; delving into the world of beans and vegetables; and discovering the joy of cooking and eating together!

Sustainable food production: Understanding the impact of food production on the climate, and ways to reduce it; how to garden using climate-friendly methods.

Sustainable lifestyle: Tips and tricks for reducing consumption of resources like energy and water, as well as minimizing waste production.

Composting: Learn how to compost at home or in your backyard and explore different composting methods suitable for an urban environment, such as Bokashi composting, hot composting, and worm composting.

Basic upcycling skills: Learn how to create simple DIY building projects using shared tools.

Building a learning community: Share skills, resources, and experiences to support fellow course participants and the De Kaskantine community in making positive changes. Learn how to apply all the above skills at a community level in the future, if you desire.

Materials We Provide You:

• Lunch (which we'll cook and enjoy together during the course)
• Organic seedlings and seeds for your garden in spring, summer, and autumn
• A binder to create your own gardening journal, complete with helpful handouts for note-taking and garden planning
• Access to an online platform to continue your learning experience and connect with fellow course participants
• Access to a curated library of climate, cooking, and gardening books
• A pair of gardening gloves
  

Additional Benefits:

• Option to volunteer in the garden twice a month to practice skills like gardening, composting, and building
• Access to Kaskantine workshop space for three hours after each course meeting to work on your own DIY projects, such as building and mending
• Year-long membership to Bokashi Club, Kaskantine's neighborhood composting program—bring us your food scraps!
• Participation in our monthly community food events

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Access to private online platform

Our private Scoby platform provides a digital community hub, free from distractions, that extends the offline learning experience. Course participants have their own personalized space where they can access resources and exchange information with each other. The platform is accessible on both desktop and as a mobile app.

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Format of the course:

• The course meets once a month for 8 months on Saturdays, from 9:00-15:00, including lunch time.
• Each 6-hour session covers gardening and cooking topics relevant to the current season.
• Course days blend theoretical learning with hands-on activities.
• After class, participants are welcome to stay at Kaskantine to use shared tools and materials for personal DIY projects, such as building or sewing.

Course Details

Location: Kaskantine, Handbalstraat 1, 1062 XK Amsterdam
Language: English
Course Size: Limited to max. 10 Participants
Dates & Times: Saturdays, March 29, April 5, May 3, June 7, July 5, August 2, September 6, October 4  from 09:00-15:00

• At the final course meeting, we'll make pizza, and participants can invite family & friends to celebrate what they have learned. 

Cost: 550 Euros (paid by March 3ed, 2025)

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De Kaskantine: an off-grid learning environment 

De Kaskantine is an experiment in going off-grid, relying on solar energy and rainwater. Participants will learn about alternative resource management methods from upcycling building materials and collecting rainwater to producing solar energy.

While the course focuses on what participants can do on the household level (their very own urban homestead), de Kaskantine serves as an example of a modern homestead and gives you an idea of how sustainability and self-sufficiency can be on a community level.

As you'll see throughout the year, we are as a result highly dependent on nature. For instance, we need solar energy to generate electricity, and we need to collect rainwater for most of our water supply. 
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Instructors

The founders of De Kaskantine, Menno and Betty, will lead this course. With the help of volunteers, they have moved and rebuilt the project three times including the restaurant and transformed a former football field into a thriving garden, all the while with the aim to build knowledge and expand community-based projects.

While they believe that we need a system change, they understand that empowering individuals and communities with knowledge and skills is crucial in combating climate change. Their passion for climate-based solutions and learning is at the heart of their desire to create a hands-on, practical course for city dwellers to take tangible actions, both personally and in their community.

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Sign Up for Our Introduction Day: February 15, 2025, 11:00–12:30

To ensure this course is the right fit, all potential participants are invited to an Introduction Day on 15.02.2025. This event allows you to meet us, tour the venue, and learn what to expect from the course experience—as well as meet your potential fellow participants.

With only 10 spots available, priority will be given to the first 10 people who sign up for and attend the Introduction Day. If more than 10 people sign up, we'll place additional registrants on a waitlist and notify them if spots open up. The course requires a minimum of 8 participants to proceed.

After attending, you'll have one week to confirm your spot by making the payment. If we don't receive payment within the week, we'll offer your place to the next person on the waitlist.
Thank you for your interest!

We're excited to meet you and help you decide if this is the right course for you!

Registration form

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FAQs

What is the Climate-Friendly kitchen course about?

The course covers practical, hands-on skills in gardening, cooking, composting, and basic building skills, and focuses on sustainable food practices from growing to cooking to composting. The course aims to help participants understand the impact of food and energy use and waste production and create a more sustainable lifestyle.

Who is this course for?

This course is for city dwellers who are looking to make changes towards a more sustainable lifestyle in a supportive community, with a focus on gardening, cooking, and composting. ​

is this course suitable for advanced gardeners?

No, this course is designed for beginner gardeners to gain the skills for their first years of gardening. ​

Do i need to be a vegan to be in this course?

This course is for vegans and non-vegans alike. During the course, we will be cooking plant-based meals that do not feature animal products, however during the course, we will discussing the Planetary Health Diet, developed by the EAT-Lancet Commission, which does feature a small amount of animal products, should you want to consume them. ​

Do i need to have access to a garden currently to join this course?

It would be beneficial to have some space to garden, whether at home even in a few containers, or in a rented plot elsewhere, so that you can apply what you are learning on a daily basis and observe your garden throughout the seasons. However we do understand that there may be some people who would like to first learn theory in preparation for when they one day have a garden. That is fine too, and they may find it then beneficial to apply their newly gained knowledge during our optional volunteer workdays. Kaskantine however does not offer garden plots for participants. ​

Is this a permaculture course?

No. While we will give an overview of different gardening philosophies, we are not a permaculture course. ​

​YOU WANT TO GARDEN, BUT THE TIME ISN'T RIGHT, OR YOU LIVE TOO FAR AWAY, OR...?

If this course is not quite the curriculum you are looking for, or the course times are not quite right, or we are not conveniently located for you, consider checking out some of these other Amsterdam gardening courses:

• Get Down, Get Dirty 
• Wildernis Plant and Garden Workshops
• Basiscursus Moestuinieren