Download a copy of the new report by clicking on the cover below!

City Blossoms is seeking dynamic, creative, garden-loving individuals to help lead programming and make greening the city exciting. City Blossoms’ programming lead programming and make greening the city exciting. City Blossoms’ programming includes regular weekly workshops at several locations in Washington, D.C.,Takoma Park, and Baltimore, as well as family-oriented weekend events, volunteer days and various community events.

Experience in education (schools, summercamps, out-of-school programs) is required and Spanish-speaking skills are a plus. Gardening and/or Arts knowledge/confidence is extremely helpful! Must be available to work weekdays and some Saturdays. Internship includes hands-on experience in leading workshops as well as varied administrative tasks. A small stipend is provided for successful completion of this internship. Potential for part-time employment is contingent on the completion of this internship. Applicants with access to a car are highly desired. Please send your resume along with a cover letter to Lola Bloom lola@cityblossoms.org

History the Natural Way Series: Open Fire Cuisine

Saturday, May 21, 2011  1:00 pm – 2:30 pm at Croydon Creek Nature Center

Croydon Creek Nature Center is teaming up with Peerless Rockville and Culinary Historian Michael Twitty to present a series of adult programs on the history of Rockville and Montgomery County.

Ages 18+

Food historian, Michael W. Twitty, presents a demonstration of open-fire cookery and a discussion of historic Montgomery County foodways and food history. Come prepare a baked treat from the 18th and 19th centuries and share stories of heirloom recipes and family traditions; and learn about the legacy of Maryland’s gastronomic heritage. Fee: $12/$16NR. Please register in advance as spaces are limited.
More info: http://www.rockvillemd.gov/croydoncreek

Neighborhood Farm Initiative Plant Sales!
Featuring organically grown tomato, pepper, squash, and herb seedlings!

Every Saturday in May
10:00 am – 1:00 pm

At Community Forklift
4671 Tanglewood Drive
Edmonston, MD 20781
(five minutes outside NE DC)

All proceeds to benefit NFI, a non-profit educational urban farm located in Northeast DC. www.neighborhoodfarminitiative.org

Community Forklift is DC’s thrift store for home improvement!  Instead of donating clothing and couches, folks donate renovation leftovers like cabinets, doors, lights, and lumber. The building materials can then be sold to the public at very low prices (40% to 80% below big-box stores). Donations are tax-deductible. www.CommunityForklift.com

Happy National Garden Month!

As gardeners look forward to beginning a new season, we’d like to remind you to think about how your work in the garden can be a part of the global warming solution.

Last spring, as you may remember, we announced the publication of our guide, The Climate-Friendly Gardener: A Guide to Combating Global Warming from the Ground Up. Thousands of gardeners around the country have already received copies of this guide and are putting climate-friendly gardening practices to work in their own yards!

This spring, check out our new, short videos that demonstrate two of our recommended climate-friendly garden techniques—composting and planting trees. If you have already adopted these practices, please forward these valuable resources on to your fellow gardeners.

Our final video explains how gardeners can help make an impact on an even larger scale—by supporting the adoption of climate-friendly practices on our nation’s farms. As Congress prepares for the next Farm Bill, which will determine the course of food-related policy in our country, gardeners can play a key role. Our videoexplains how!

If you have any questions or would like more information, feel free to contact me. And, of course, if you would like free copies of this publication, please email Jenn Yates at jyates@ucsusa.org.

We hope you enjoy the videos and guide, and wish you a happy and sustainable garden season!

- From The Food and Environment Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists

cross-posted from The American Observer - American University’s Graduate Journalism Magazine

The sight of students donning work boots and brandishing garden equipment amid concrete and steel may conjure up notions of hippie farmers struggling to convert even the smallest plot of green space into an opportunity for gardening.

That doesn’t bother the student voluteeers of EcoSense, though. Members of the campus environmental group are proud of their dedication to sustainability.

“We get a lot of flack from other organizations for being hippies, but we take it as a complement,” Katie Bohri, a sociology graduate student (2011) and AU community garden coordinator, said during a phone conversation while prepping the beds for a campus community garden.

Humble beginnings

The group recently marked St. Patrick’s Day by “going green” in more ways than one.  On the agenda: preparing seedlings for this year’s garden.

Bohri brought egg cartons and re-purposed plastic yogurt containers to incubate the particle-sized seeds that would eventually become the seedlings planted in the garden by the on Campus Beautification Day on April 6.  The bean, strawberry and pepper plants will go on to become the bounty of the 2011 community garden.

EcoSense member and AU sophomore Claire Williamson (Environmental Studies, 2013) outfitted a few cups with bean seeds.  She will be studying sustainability abroad  in Denmark for one semester and will take over the garden next spring.

“I think the garden is a really great way for people to get out and interact with nature and see where we get our food,” said Williamson. “There’s a disconnect between what we eat, where it’s grown and how it’s grown.”

But as Bohri knows, the garden is more than just the fruits and vegetables that are cultivated there. The community garden is a microcosm of the community at-large.  It serves as an epicenter for relationship-building and interaction — a multidimensional learning experience that goes beyond the classroom.

“Getting our hands dirty and doing it together can be really humbling,” said Bohri. “We make different connections with each other than if we were in a classroom – there aren’t any grades in the garden and there’s seldom an opportunity to show off academically.”

Sowing the seeds of community

The community garden began in 2009 with a $1,000 grant from AU’s Eagle Endowment and a bit of coalition building with other partners on campus, including the Facilities Management department.  It’s a relationship that has continued to thrive.

“Actually we were interested from the start,” said Mark Feist, assistant director of grounds, vehicle maintenance and support services. “I really found it coincidental for them to approach us” about the garden.

Prior to establishing the garden, Facilities Management fostered interactive beautification activities involving students and faculty through programs like “adopt-a-spot,” a program that encouraged volunteers to adopt small spots of green around campus and maintain them. The establishment of a community garden was a logical next step.

Feist said that Facilities Management wanted “closer working partnerships with the students. This [garden] was a way to do that.”

After the current planting and harvesting season, the community garden will relocate to a more visible area on campus. Feist said, “This year we’re in the process of expanding the garden. We’ve even been looking at another more prominent spot on campus. We certainly have support to do that on the FM side.”

Aside from relocation, future plans for the garden include programs to engage the surrounding AU community both on and off campus including faculty, as well as eventually ramping up production so that students can depend on harvests from the garden to grow their own sustainable supply of produce.

Gardening outside the campus

While the AU community has been supportive of the campus garden, community gardening off-campus ican be more complicated.

“There’s a lot of emotion and conversation around [planning gardens]” says Katie Rehwaldt, the program director of Seeds That Grow Hope, and co-coordinator of Rooting D.C., an annual community gardening conference that occurs in February.

One of the problems D.C. has is that there is no green space in the District that isn’t coveted by potential buyers. “There isn’t a square inch of earth in this town that’s not worth anything,” said Rehwaldt.

In addition, Rehwaldt said, politicians will publicly support gardens to bolster their political image and then reject garden plans behind closed doors when the positive hype has died down.

Even with all of the political wrangling, the support for gardens is growing. Rehwaldt, who also coordinates her local community garden in the Twin Oaks neighborhood, has seen the interest in community gardening skyrocket in the last 12 months. Last year the wait list to get into the her neighborhood’s community garden was 42 people, this year the list was over 100.

One of the future goals of the AU community garden is to reach out to citizens beyond the borders of campus. Even though the garden is not counted in the garden census commissioned by Rooting D.C., the one thing that all community gardens have in common is the ability to bring individuals together for a common cause.

Published in American Observer, Saturday, April 16, Volume 17, No. 42