A class on organic gardening beginning next month will help home gardeners start or improve their gardens while supporting a community organization.

Hope for Suffolk will offer the “Getting Back to Eden” gardening class for six weeks starting Jan. 10. It will be taught by Meredith Alphin, who has taken classes on horticulture and has several years of experience in the Hope for Suffolk garden.

“I’m hoping people will see it’s not so difficult, and you can have a successful garden organically,” Alphin said.

The class will cover things like soil type, water management, selecting what to grow and designing the garden.

One of the most important topics will be pest management, Alphin said.

“It’s really hard for organic gardeners to manage the bug issue we have here in the Southeast,” Alphin said.

Alphin is a specialist in “permaculture,” an abbreviation for permanent agriculture. It focuses on “being able to create a garden system that is less input and more output,” Alphin said. One way that happens is by growing plants that mutually benefit one another.

Hayden Blythe, director of Hope for Suffolk, said Alphin has helped drastically improve the profitability of the garden. All the money it makes goes to support the people who work in it, Blythe said.

The garden work program helps people with employment difficulties gain work skills and references and fill gaps in resumes, Blythe said. The produce sold supports the workers.

“Our primary focus isn’t teaching people gardening skills,” Blythe said. “Our primary focus is getting people into the workforce.”

Learning about organic gardening and healthy eating are a bonus, Blythe said, but the workers usually do not eat the food from the garden directly.

“Most of our people have a significant amount of assistance with food,” she said. However, they lack employment because of a variety of factors — criminal background, disability and lack of transportation among them. “With the garden, we can overcome all of those things with the way that we do it,” Blythe said.

Alphin’s experience has helped make the garden about six times more profitable than when it first started, Blythe said, which has improved the success of the work program.

“We can’t pay our workers if it’s not profitable,” she said.

Proceeds from the class also will support the garden and its workers.

The class will be held on six consecutive Sundays from 6 to 7:30 p.m. starting Jan. 10. The cost is $10 per class or $50 for the entire course. It will meet at Westminster Reformed Presbyterian Church, 3488 Godwin Blvd.

Those interested can reserve their spot by emailing Meredith@wrpca.org.