Join master gardener and nature-inspired designer Dustin Bajer for a workshop and discussion on how to turf your turf, and build something that works better for people and for the places we live.

A conventional lawn asks a lot and gives back very little. We’ll look at what replaces it — planting that supports biodiversity, uses less water, feeds pollinators, and holds up better through drought and heat.

This is the session where observation turns into action. Practical changes you can make at a yard’s scale, and what happens when enough yards on a block make them.

Whether you have a yard, tend a garden, share a balcony, or are just curious, you’re welcome.

Meet Dustin Bajer

Dustin Bajer is an educator, urban farmer, writer and nature-inspired designer who believes cities are ecotones — places where human ingenuity and natural systems meet and produce abundance. Edmonton sits in Aspen Parkland, between prairie and boreal forest, and he takes that overlap as a working model for how a city might be built.

He started the Edmonton Guerrilla Gardeners in 2007, casting seed into back alleys, boulevards and vacant lots. At Jasper Place High School he built a courtyard food forest of more than eighty edible perennial species that fed the school cafeteria, and worked with students to design and run Canada’s first high school aquaponics system. In 2014 he partnered with the City of Edmonton’s Roots for Trees program to plant thousands of edible native plants in the river valley.

In 2021 he founded Shrubscriber, which brings together gardeners, schools and community groups to propagate and distribute trees toward a food-secure, biodiverse and climate-adapted Edmonton. He also founded BeeComm, a community for small-scale beekeepers, and has catalogued Edmonton’s heritage trees through the Alberta Tree Register. He received Edify’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2018 and the Edmonton Urban Forestry Award in 2021.