The Virginia Cooperative Extension’s Urban Agriculture Symposium, a day of workshops and discussions about growing food in urban areas for personal use or for sale, is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 3, from 9 a.m. – 2 p.m. at the Fairlington Community Center, located at 3308 S. Stafford St., Arlington.

Topics that will be discussed at the event include growing vegetables in small backyard spaces or community gardens, soilless production of mushrooms and microgreens, producing food for community food banks and planting trees that provide both shade and fruit.

Dr. Marcus Comer, the Small Farm Outreach Program Director in the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Virginia State University in Petersburg, will be the keynote speaker at the event. He will discuss the lessons learned from his work with Petersburg’s Harding Street Urban Agriculture Center, a model of indoor farming dedicated to increasing access to healthy food and mitigating poverty that is funded by the USDA and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

The event costs $10 for advanced registration and $10 for on site registration, which open at 8:30 a.m. on October 3. For more information or to preregister, visit mgnv.org.