Homegrown Community Garden Tour 2012

This past Sunday was our 3rd annual Homegrown Garden Tour. With a break in the late summer heat, it was a beautiful evening to showcase 5 of our community and school gardens and the people that make them possible. More than 50 community members came out to experience and celebrate the State Street, Cleveland Lane, Plowshares, South Ukiah Head Start and Thunderbird Apartments gardens. Garden members served tasty bites made from their own produce, played music, grilled out and gave tours of their bountiful plots.

The evening wound down at the Grace Hudson Museum as people enjoyed fresh caprese salad, sipped wine, traded garden tips and discussed how adorable the Head Start garden is while they listened to lovely music provided by Steven Hahm and Sid Bishop. Thank you to all who came out to support the Gardens Project! We hope to see you again next year! 

A big thank you to everyone who  made the event possible!            

Garden managers and garden members from all five gardens

Grace Hudson Museum

Husch Vineyards, Fetzer Vineyards and Jaxon Keys Winery

Sid Bishop and Steven Hahm

Wipf Construction

Patrona Restaurant and Lounge

For more pictures visit our facebook page or our flicker page

Extra pears put to good use, thanks Nelson Family!

Here at the Gardens Project we'd like to extend a heartfelt THANK YOU to the Nelson Ranch for letting the public harvest pears that otherwise would have gone to waste. It was a big step in the right direction for creating a stronger sense of community and supporting a local food system.

More than 1,200lbs of pears were harvested in just one weekend. Gleaners included individual community members and families, as well as elementary, middle, and pre-school staff who were able to incorporate fresh pear treats and tastings into their lesson plans the following week.

At Calpella School the pears were used to teach the nutritional value of fruit and to encourage the students to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables in their daily diet. At Head Start, this pear harvest coincided with “Pear Week” in the Food For Thought lessons, which gave pre-schoolers a chanceto taste and compare varieties of pears, make pear sauce, pear bread, and dehydrate the remaining pear.

Whether pickled, dried, baked, or juiced, the pears were greatly enjoyed by community members of all ages. We have heard nothing but appreciative and positive remarks about having the opportunity to glean the pears and everyone hopes to be able to do it again in the future.

Thanks again Nelson Family Vineyards for sharing your pears with the community!

The Merit and Joy of Preschool Gardening

In November of 2009, I fell into coordinating a preschool garden when the then coordinator had to step back for reasons of familial health. Almost a year and a half later, I am a convert, a true and firm believer, in the merit, value, and worth of gardening in preschools. Not to mention a recipient of the joy of it.

When I begin working at the preschool garden, I hadn’t spent a ton of time with preschool age kids, or done a ton of gardening, or a ton of coordinating of school or community gardens. I would scramble to come up with activities to do with the kids; something engaging for little ones but also productive for our garden. We started peas, transplanted all sorts of greens, weeded, sowed radish seeds, harvested tomatoes and brought them to the cook.

As I’ve become more comfortable with the little ones, though, and with the rhythms and realities of gardening, the nature of our preschool gardening has changed. We play more now. We dance and sing and use our imagination and laugh a whole lot. And what used to be our work – planting, weeding, harvesting – continues but has grown increasingly playful. The whole thing – the playing, the working, the eating – has become one thing – exploring.

Encouraging exploration and creating a safe, joyful, and engaging space for it to happen, is what preschool gardening is all about. And what gardening at any age should really be about. Exploring this magical world we live in, in all it colors and contradictions and deliciousness and smells and interconnectedness, and exploring our own relationship to that world.

These pictures are from a day when we played a game where the leader would put on this green vest and use the magical deer horn to find different colors in the garden (purple, orange, red, blue, white…) and the rest of us followed with our garden spinoculars made out of painted toilet paper tubes on a piece of yarn around our necks and looked at the things the leader found, or anything that caught our fancy.

I’ve watched as kids get soooo excited about broccoli and spinach, and care for a plant as it grows from a seed to a radish they can eat, and learn to treat other creatures gently. And I’ve seen as their parents learn, too. As one mother repeats over and over in delighted astonishment that she didn’t know that, when I tell her about how fruit comes from flowers. Or as the parents learn what a pea looks like growing, or that broccoli doesn’t have to look like the big compact head you buy at the grocery store, that you can eat leggy florets, too, and that their kids love to do so.

And I’ve heard as the parents tell me how their kids ask for more vegetables at home now, and how they try and plant seeds in the dirt on the side of the road.

Getting kids when they are this young, at the very beginning of their institutionalization, and impressing upon all of their senses the magic of this world, is a good time to start. It’s better than first grade. It’s better than sixth grade. It’s better than ninth grade. The earlier these kids can experience the flavors, the colors, the smells, the textures that really are life, the more they will be receptive to those experiences later on in life and want them. And if we can get their families involved at that young age, too, and make eating well something that doesn’t seem impossible but seems delightfully familiar, then we are golden.

Preschool gardens forever!

Natural Building in Community Gardens

I recently attended a week long Natural Building Intensive course at Emerald Earth in Boonville. In this course, we learned how to use basic materials such as wood, earth, rock, and straw to build beautiful, safe structures. The methods feel so intuitive, and the work is most often accomplished as a community. Using these techniques, you can build large homes and skyscrapers, but I'm to take what I learned and start small by constructing some structures and garden features in community gardens throughout Mendocino County. We are starting with a small cob greenhouse at the South Ukiah Head Start Preschool garden, a cob bench at the Cleveland Lane Community Garden, and counters and benches to surround the earth oven already constructed at Talmage State Preschool (there is also a cob greenhouse there!). In Willits, Mason has plans to also build a shed in the WISC garden, and in Ft. Bragg at the Learning Garden, Veronica Morales of the Noyo Food Forest plans to build an earth oven.


This is an example of a cob bench at Emerald Earth.

These structures will make the gardens even more functional, beautiful spaces for communities to gather. And the best part is, we're going to build them together, strengthening partnerships with different organization, such as the Solar Living Institute and Head Start Preschools, and building community so that we can then take what we know to share with others. I can't wait! See you out there.

happily yours,