Durham Tech to host NC Community Garden Gathering Nov. 9

Community gardeners from across North Carolina will gather for a day of learning, networking and fun on Saturday, November 9, 2013, at Durham Tech in Durham, NC.

The event, Nurturing Sustainable Community Gardens: How To Get Rooted In Your Community, will feature presentations on community gardening topics from food raising to fundraising, a community garden tour of the Briggs Avenue Community Garden, and a lively Pecha Kucha showcase of creative garden ideas.

Dr. Lucy Bradley of NCSU will give an overview of community gardening across North Carolina.

“Help spread the word to anyone interested, and please attend if you can,” writes Don Boekelheide, a longtime community gardener in the Charlotte region.

“Not only will you really enjoy meet like-minded folks from all over the state and pick up great contacts and cool ideas, you'll have a great time and eat well.”

School gardens are part of the agenda, he adds, and so is finding grants and support.

The event is sponsored by the North Carolina Community Garden Partners (NCCGP) and Nourishing North Carolina. 

Want to go?

The event will be 8:30 a.m.-4:30 P.M. at the Phail Wynn Jr. Student Center at Durham Tech, 1637 E Lawson St  Durham, NC 27703. Registration includes lunch. Cost is $15 for NCCGP members, $20 for others. Get details at nccgp.eventbrite.comCLICK HERE for more details and online registration

Get fruit shrubs, trees at Cooperative Extension Fall Plant Sale

Here’s a way to plant fruit trees, vines and shrubs in your yard while supporting the work of the Mecklenburg County Cooperative Extension.  Simply take part in the group’s annual fall plant sale –now through Nov. 7.  You can place orders by phone or through the extension service website for several varieties of Georgia- and Alabama-grown blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, muscadines and fig trees.

All plants are sold in 1-gallon containers and are well adapted to the Piedmont growing conditions. Cost for plants is $8 each.

Order deadline is Nov. 7. Proceeds from the sale will support educational programming in Mecklenburg County. Please note that orders are non-refundable and plants do not have a warranty.

How to order

CLICK TO ORDER on line or call the Extension Service office at 704-336-2082 weekdays. Pick up your plants 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Nov. 14-15 at the extension service office, 1418 Armory Drive, Charlotte.

River District takes its STEM lessons on the road to Raleigh

By Edna Chirico

CLICK TO HEAR Dr. Klemmer's introduction from Bok Tower Gardens

The River District’s involvement in STEM education is gaining statewide recognition. Recently, three members of our team coordinated an hour-long breakout session at the NC STEM Bridging the Gap Conference in Raleigh.
This annual conference by the NC Association for Biomedical Research seeks to strengthen K-16 STEM education throughout North Carolina.
Educators, business leaders, government officials and others involved in science, technology, engineering and math-focused (STEM) education come to share ideas and resources.
As you probably know, the River District has become deeply involved in improving our nearby schools through hands-on STEM learning opportunities such as schoolyard gardens, STEM learning events and even our roving chicken tractor
Our presenting team at the STEM conference on Oct. 15 included:
• Dr. Cynthia Klemmer, director of education at Florida’s Bok Tower Gardens, leading a video-supported presentation on teaching children about plant parts. CLICK TO VIEW THE VIDEO, "Foods We Eat: Parts of a Plant."
• Megan Lambert, senior culinary instructor at Johnson and Wales University, demonstrating how teachers can use cooking in the classroom to support lessons on plant parts.
• And me, sharing the Catawba River District’s programs including our 11-county regional partnership focused on STEM skills and schoolyard gardens.
Our presentation concluded with an overview of our Southern Spring Show Ultimate Schoolyard Garden design and strategy, plus the opportunity for our audience to sample Megan’s Plant Parts Salad and dressing.
The program was well received (and tasty!) with numerous questions and thoughts from educators around North Carolina.
This is one more reason to support the Catawba River District in our STEM focused initiatives.

River District reaches milestone – federal tax-exempt status

501c3. That mix of numbers and letters means a lot to nonprofit groups – the seal of authenticity, you might say.
Catawba River District, after several years of work, recently received its official designation from the IRS as a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, effective June 2012 (the IRS took a while). The Catawba River District was recognized as a North Carolina non-profit for the last 5 years.
Having the federal tax-exempt status makes our work much easier for finding funding, since most foundations and government grant-givers require that status. Nonprofit status also means that donors may not have to pay income tax on charitable donations to us.
Several people have put in a lot of time on this effort, including our executive director, Edna Chirico; her husband, John Huber, who handles much of the River District’s paperwork; and attorney Dan Hansen of the law firm Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, who has provided extensive pro bono legal service to our group.
We also appreciate the support of Vicki Bott and others at Centralina Council of Governments, which has acted as our fiscal agent while we worked to get nonprofit designation from the IRS.
"We truly could not have been as successful as we have been with our programs and initiatives without their support," Edna says.

Ultimate Garden takes lots of planning AND planting

The greenhouse at CPCC's Cato Campus

Putting together the Ultimate Schoolyard Garden takes many skills, thousands of hours of work, and a lot of plants – Perhaps 6,000 plus extras, just in case, estimates Annie West, a senior horticulture instructor at CPCC.
 “Stuff happens,” explains West, who with fellow horticulturalist Kaiti O’Donnell is overseeing plant production for the schoolyard garden display at next February’s Southern Spring Home & Garden Show. Visitors will see a fishpond, hydroponics, chickens, composting, bees, water reuse and thousands of plants from broccoli to sunflowers that normally don’t grow here in February.

Our goal: Planting the seeds of schoolyard gardening

The goal of the Ultimate Schoolyard Garden is to show area educators, garden enthusiasts or beginning gardeners ways to connect schoolyard gardening to curriculum from pre-K through High School and to show that every subject being taught can be enhanced through hands-on learning within the schoolyard garden.
The Ultimate Schoolyard Garden display will include plants common to local vegetable gardens and the nearly 100 schoolyard gardens that have been created in recent years to augment classroom instruction at area schools. There also will be an international area featuring plants common in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The garden plants will be joined by native plants, trees and shrubs and be incorporated into a recycled pallet structure being assembled by CPCC Harper Campus.

Timing is almost everything

That achievement requires planning, timing and facilities that can create spring growing conditions in the winter.
It sounds complex, but it’s really a matter of doing the math and providing the right growing conditions, Annie says. “So if I can get an eggplant to grow and produce a crop for me to harvest in 60 days, I start with that and work backward.” Then you find a way to create the growing environment that eggplants prefer.

Four educational gardens helping produce the plants

Four area educational facilities with greenhouses will do the growing: the horticulture programs at North Mecklenburg High School and CPCC’s Cato Campus, plus two unique facilities that incorporate horticulture in their programs: LIFESPAN (serving children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities) and Holy Angels (providing specialized, round-the-clock care for children and adults with intellectual developmental disabilities and delicate medical conditions).
If all goes well, visitors to the Ultimate Schoolyard Garden will a cornucopia of food-producing plants that our children can grow and learn from at school and, for that matter, at home.
And if not – if an ice storm kills the power at one of the greenhouses, for instance, or some plants don’t mature as fast as the gardeners had hoped – then what?
“If it’s close, no one will know,” says the veteran horticulturalist. “Gardening is like Christmas: What “Santa brings is what you get.”

Can you sponsor or volunteer?

As you can tell, this project needs extensive sponsorship and many volunteer hands between now and February. To learn more about how you can help, visit our GARDEN SPONSORSHIP WEBPAGE, where you can also download a detailed packet of materials. You can also EMAIL Edna Chirico, Executive Director of the Catawba River District, or call her at 704-562-8847.

Learn more

The Southern Spring Home & Garden Show will take place Feb. 21-23 and Feb. 28-March 2 at the Park Expo and Conference Center in Charlotte.
• Learn more about the Home & Garden Show at Southernshows.com.
• Learn more about the Ultimate Schoolyard Garden at catawbariverdistrict.org.

Green Teacher Network wants you, even if Nov. 1 event is full

Darlene Petranick of the NC Farm Bureau offers an egg lesson

The River District’s fledgling Green Teacher Network is taking off! We have had so much interest in our second quarterly workshop on Nov. 1 that we have closed registration for the event!
If you had hoped to come but haven’t registered, don’t despair! Just go to our website and SIGN UP for the Green Teacher Network newsletter. We will let you know about Network programs including our next session in February.
What generated all the interest? The network has answered into an unmet need – an easy way for volunteers and teachers at scores of  schoolyard gardens to get information and help.
Our own experience launching schoolyard gardens in the Catawba River District showed us that while our teachers and garden volunteers are uniformly enthusiastic about helping kids learn through gardens, they have a broad range of gardening knowledge.
Plus many people want to share what they’ve learned and get help from veterans when they encounter problems.

Team effort to create network

The River District worked with several partners to launch the Green Teacher network in August:  the Mecklenburg County Health Department, Gaston County Schools, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Food Policy Council, Friendship Gardens and Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated.

Our team agreed that the Network would establish and facilitate a collaboration of educators throughout the Charlotte region who meet quarterly to share information, network and collaborate to enhance hands-on learning, supporting local foods, and expanding current health and wellness initiatives through school-based gardening.

We also decided that the network would be open to all teachers from public, private, charter and home schools are invited to participate. In addition, all educators directly involved in the local food and growing economy are invited to participate.

The launch in August

Working with local garden and health experts, we launched the Green Teacher Network as students returned to school in August. Our first session provided general information about the River District, details about our Ultimate Schoolyard Garden project (CLICK to learn about it) and a 30-minute hands-on lesson on teaching science and math with eggs (We even brought the chickens!). The day ended with informal conversations over lunch and a tour of the host school’s extensive gardens.

Nov. 1 program

We expect about 80 people to attend our free Nov. 1 program at CPCC’s Harris Campus near Billy Graham Parkway. The Mecklenburg County Health Department is doing much of the organizational work for the event and providing the free lunch.
The main topic is “Gardening 101,” on how to launch a successful schoolyard garden. Several of the people who have signed up to attend have extensive gardening experience themselves. Participants will have time to network over lunch, meet a composting expert from Mecklenburg County and tour the CPCC’s own gardens.
And people who can’t come? We plan to videotape the main presentation and make that available to watch online for free.

Join the Network – Get our newsletter

If you want to learn more about the Green Teacher Network, the simplest way is to sign up for our newsletter. We will have details later this fall on plans for the next network event in February, plus links to the video and other information. CLICK to register.
If you have specific questions, you may also contact our executive director, Edna Chirico, at echirico@catawbariverdistrict.org.