Yep, unless there is some major catastrophe …. I will be driving from Dade City area by myself it looks like, so if you're interested in carpooling let me know. I know some of the people who put the Convergence together and the last their event I attended was a blast, not to mention that it was great to find out that I'm not the only person in FL interested in this type of stuff :)

As for the biochar – I need to look into it deeper (the Convergence should be a good place for that – they plan to make a bunch and then cook all meals on it) but my first instinct is that in FL it may or may not worth all the troubles. There is very little organic matter, etc in our soils – it's all in the plants, which is typical for sandy (sub) tropical places. I wonder if all the good stuff will be washed out of biochar too quickly. On the other hand, buried logs are usually completely gone in a few years (vs. several or more in temperate climates), so I wonder if we can just skip the step of burning it to make it more available to plants – seems that in this here climate insects/bacteria/fungi/etc. don't need much help with that. And since I'm very lazy I'm all for letting somebody else to do my work if they want to, so to me hugelculture seems like a better approach, at least in our conditions. Just my instinct though – didn't have a chance to play with biochar yet.