Burpee Gardening’s Post

Are you interested in gardening? Are you a nonprofit needing someone to help with gardening? Join Full Circle FarmCorps. We are here to connect gardeners and nonprofits and give back to communities by donating produce, engaging with community events, and teaching the importance of nutrition education. #growlocal #americorps #jointhemovement

Spring 2024- activation of phase 1, includes the entire Old Second Ward, and extends south to Hist. Pleasant Street, Cherry Street to the north, and all contiguous alleys and cross streets from 5th to 19th. Cherry, Hannibal, Division, Mulberry, Vine, Walnut, Hist. Pleasant, and Pleasant Street as the primary boundaries included in the Historic Mill District. Flowering Cherry Trees - Homeowners are encouraged to plant specific varieties of flowering Cherry Trees which will not only place “Cherry Trees on Cherry Street”, but also in the contiguous corridor which includes Pleasant, Hist. Pleasant, Walnut, Vine, Mulberry, Division, Hannibal, Cherry, and the cross streets and Alleys from 19th street to 5th. Over $2,000 has been specifically donated and earmarked to SERVE NOBLEVILLE this year already to facilitate opportunities for education, and resources for neighbors in this area to plant a flowering Cherry Tree in their front or side yards. As of June of 2023, 15 brand new plantings have occurred. What can you do? Select a variety from the below list and plant a tree, or contact Serve Noblesville for assistance or for a donated tree and planting. Encouraged varieties that are most conducive to central Indiana includes:   Fruit bearing – Montmorency Cherry, Bing Cherry, Stella Cherry Non-fruit bearing- Yoshino Cherry Tree To request a SERVE Noblesville tree planting in your front or side yard, please e-mail oldsecondward@gmail.com Be sure to include your name and address. Of course, if you prefer, you can purchase and plant your own flowering Cherry Tree for you or a neighbor. Serve Village

Gardening / planning season is upon us! (if you're in Seattle, don't miss the Tilth Alliance May Edible plant sale on the 2nd!) And while you're planning, please consider growing a little extra to donate. Donating your extra harvest is a fantastic way to make an impact this growing season and the Fresh Food Connect app makes it easy to find local donation partners like pantries and hunger relief organizations. Last year alone, Fresh Food Connect facilitated healthy food access for over 30,000 individuals. Home gardeners like you and me donated a whopping 50,000 pounds of produce through the app. This translates to approximately 40,000 healthy meals served and a significant reduction of 26 tons of CO2e emissions. How Can You Help? You can pledge as little as 1 pound of produce (which is roughly equivalent to 3 medium-sized tomatoes). Even if you’re a newbie gardener, like me, this is a super manageable amount that can make a big difference. The Fresh Food Connect team has set a goal of 25,000 pounds of homegrown produce pledged by May 31! Ready to pledge? Click on the link in comments and share the bounty from your garden! 🌱🍅🥕

Got 15 minutes to plant 10 trees? Who doesn't?! 🌳 dscout's Research team is digging into the dynamics impacting the field of UXR. If you are in the industry, or in a field that works closely with UXR, please take our UXR Landscape survey and add your voice. You'll get early access to the report, and for each complete, we are donating $10 to One Tree Planted (that's 10 trees!). The insights from this project will help shape our #PeopleNerds content so that we can continue creating resources that support you and your research goals. So drop your gardening tools, share your thoughts below, and let's plant some trees! Start the survey: https://lnkd.in/gpYus3Cq

Would you choose Paper 📰, Plastic 🥤, or Our Planet 🌎? It may seem like an easy question but there are challenges a lot of people don't think of. Students at Galaxy E3 Elementary School took an oath to choose our planet, meaning instead of plastics they choose to use earth made products such as clay, glass, metal, etc. Want to learn the dangers of plastic and end with choosing our planet 💚💙? Check out our program at https://lnkd.in/gyR3ER4h. #oceanconservation #gardening101 #butterflies #gardeningtips #gardening #fishinglife #fishing #dunerestoration #yea #nonprofit #nonprofitfundraising #nonprofitlife #greenevents #volunteer #environmentaleducation #youthenvironmentalalliance #kidseducation #experiments #environment #jointhealliance

LinkedIn friends, we need your help! One of our charities has a specific need. The amazing team at Sweetpea Smallholdings CIC is in need of gardening tools to support its mission to provide homegrown vegetables to food banks in Exeter Sweetpea Smallholdings is a new Community Interest Company (CIC) based in Exeter, and focuses all its efforts on supporting the local community. It's on a mission to increase the opportunities that are currently on offer to the local disabled community and has done just this by creating a meaningful and accessible volunteering programme. Sweetpea’s volunteers come together regularly to work towards a worthy goal: to grow and deliver food for those most in need across Exeter. Everything that is grown at Sweetpea Smallholdings’ allotment is donated to local food banks. In 2022, Sweetpea Smallholdings donated a whopping 1.4 tonnes of fresh produce to families experiencing food hardship in Exeter. This year it would like to increase its donations, and is in need of gardening tools to enable more volunteers to get involved. ▶ Find out more and donate items: https://bit.ly/3EgIRfe #charity #charitydonation #circulareconomy #upcycle #sustainability #circulareconomy #charitywork #charitydonation #local #community #sendlesstolandfill #recycle #supportlocal #supportlocalcharities #supportlocalbusiness #gardeningtools #garden #growyourown #vegetables #marketgarden #exeter #exeterbusiness

My little children remained at the window. I was still trying to decide what to do with them. The situation was the same. One of the plants was growing while the other looked almost dead. Someone recommended me to ask my neighbor, a skilled and successful gardener, for advise and help. He has a beautiful and magnificent green house in his backyard where plants of many shapes and colors are growing and having a healthy and productive life. When I asked him for help he said: - Were the seeds part of a present?- he did not wait for an answer- those are bad seeds- he said- I use only selected seeds who are a guarantee for growing. Your possibilities are really limited if you use seeds of such bad quality- he said. He explained to me that he has a program for selection and the seeds need to pass a series of tests before they can be used to grow in the greenhouse. He recommended me to dispense the child who stop the growing process. He explain that sometimes, some bad seeds are selected erroneously, and they can work at the beginning, but later they disrupt the environment because their sickness and lack of energy. -I have a reputation to maintain and I do not have time for accommodations or additional support. If you want to be a successful gardener, then, you need to have the best. I recommend you to eliminate those plants, improve your selection process, and promote your program as open but selective, popular but elitist, and resourceful but very expensive- he said. Later, he sent me a request for a monetary donation. -It is for research purposes- he stated at the end.

We imagine a world where spaces around homes are effectively converted into forest gardens that will produce food for humans while providing habitat and food for local flora and fauna. Recently we changed our strategy to achieve that. Currently, we are focusing on children creating gardens around their homes. We hope to slowly bring the whole family on board to make and maintain these gardens. We already see the reflection of that strategy working in Ankan’s family. During our last weekend visit to Ankan’s family, his father wanted to create a garden on abandoned land. The idea came from Ankan’s uncle, who also watched our work. We went to inspect the patch of land. It comes under very little rainfed lowland that remains in the village. This was ideal for rice cultivation. But thanks to the irregular rain in the last couple of years, cultivating rice does not make much sense. When most land around it started converting the land into acacia plantations for fetching money by selling timber, Ankan’s family was considering an alternative. We have been sincere, saying we might be unable to help generate income from the land. IndeedWe can work towards transforming the ground in a way that the market dependence of the family on vegetables reduces significantly in the next couple of months. We often forget saving money on our daily expenses is also a form of income. 😊 The family seemed to understand that and agreed to it. We will start preparing the land by the end of October when the sogginess in the soil is gone. In the meantime, we are slowly considering how to design the garden. It makes us very happy, and the whole family slowly gets involved. The family already had the intention; it’s our work Ankan gave a nudge what they needed. We are confident this early group of adopters will bring more families on board as we progress. If you identify without cause: you can invest with us in many ways: procuring seeds and plants, designing gardening, and other activities with children. You can also invest your time and energy in raising funds which will be used to employ local youth to do experiments on how we can make our project partially self-sustaining and create a local economy. P.S: In the picture, you see Ankan standing with his grandmother, sister, and father. With lots of love, Team bon

🍄 Volunteer Spotlight: Ida! 🌱 Volunteer since: January 2022 👩🌾 Time donated: 301 hours 🏡 Area of Focus: Seed Program 💭 What has been your favorite TPF memory so far? My favorite activity at TPF was a class I took called “Meditation in the Garden”. It was so lovely. We learned about a variety of native plants and their healing properties, then we did a walking meditation around the demonstration garden. What made it extra special was that on this walk I met White Cloud Manzanita (Arctostaphylos viridissima, for the horticulturists).  She was in her full glory and I was captivated by her beauty. We have been great friends ever since.  She grows in my garden now. She takes my breath away every time I see her, especially when she is blooming. There are so many glorious California Native plants, but if I had to pick a favorite, this is it.  💪 What motivates you to volunteer with TPF? The mission. It is in alignment with one of the things I value most in life (nature). Also, life can be so stressful, and this…this is packaging seeds.  It’s so simple yet it holds so much meaning. The seeds for me represent hope, new growth, unlimited possibilities and in the case of these native plant seeds in California, a chance to create biodiversity wherever they are sowed. 🌿 What is something that volunteering at TPF has taught you? 
Volunteering at TPF has taught me a lot about seeds in a variety of ways. I learned to process seeds. To get to the seeds of some plants it takes a lot of work. The seeds taught me there are metaphors in everything we do. Seeds symbolize our humanity, our inner landscapes. In some cases we have to do a lot of work to get to the seeds (our heart and soul), but when we do, this creates opportunities to share our most authentic self with the world around us. Just like the seeds, we then bloom into our magnificence and spread happiness and joy. Seeds show us what we are meant to become. 📣🌸 Thank you Ida, for all of the volunteer work you do to contribute to our mission! If you're interesting in volunteering, sign up at: https://lnkd.in/gTtRxjDy #theodorepaynefoundation #californianativeplants #tpf #tpfvolunteers #volunteerwithus #getinvolved #volunteer

Doug Tallamy spoke at Cylburn Arboretum here in Baltimore this past Tuesday, sponsored by the Cylburn Arboretum Friends. While I had heard of him and knew he teaches and does research at the University of Delaware, I didn’t know much about his guidance for us to more sustainably plant the land around our homes. I thought it was so insightful and inspiring. I’ve always found gardening and landscaping a mystery. The way he broke it down was impressive and seemed more doable than I would have ever imagined. He went through how to return our individual properties to native grasses and insects, via thoughtful cultivation, and some simple ways to reduce / optimize our impact on the environment, vegetation and creatures around us. He cited the fact that > 80% of US land is privately held as a reason to believe this is possible, and some shocking reasons for which we cannot afford to miss this opportunity: - “a chickadee—a bird whose nestlings may consume between 6,000 and 9,000 caterpillars before they fledge, all foraged within a 150-foot radius of the nest.” Many many properties have very few, and force wildlife to seek food elsewhere - “introduced [vs. native] plant species provide on average 68 percent less food for insects than natives.” - “Tallamy estimates that the worldwide population of arthropods, chiefly insects, has declined by 45 percent from preindustrial times. Without insects, it would be the case that lizards, frogs and toads, birds and mammals, from rodents up through bears, would lose all or a large part of their diets” - “86 percent of the land east of the Mississippi is privately owned” - “Across a wide range of North American biomes, about 14 percent of plants make 90 percent of the insect food, he says. These are the keystone species that keep the food web healthy, and the most important are four genera of native trees: oaks, poplars, willows and cherries. But also hickory, chestnut, elms and birches, and joe-pye weed, aster, marsh marigold, skunk cabbage, snakeweed.” * see the website link and the Smithsonian article below for more While I learn more I’ll start with small steps like switching to yellow lightbulbs, continuing to avoid pesticides, and making native choices when we do plant. He talked about his efforts with: “HOMEGROWN NATIONAL PARK® IS… catalyzing a collective effort of individual homeowners, property owners, land managers, farmers, and anyone with some soil to plant in…to start a new HABITAT® by planting native plants and removing most invasive plants. It is the largest cooperative conservation project ever conceived or attempted… an aspirational project to repurpose half of America’s lawnscape for ecologically productive use. That would comprise more than 20 million acres, the equivalent of nearly ten Yellowstones.”