In my experience, gardening is a motivating and compelling force to bring people together. Even with our time and attention constantly split and fractured, we still find ways to come together over gardening - perhaps particularly so over food gardening. While there are pros and cons to the ever increasing presence of technology in our lives, many gardeners have found that technology can be an incredible boon to our gardening knowledge and resources and connections. Photo: Members of Chico Garden Share Project at a project-hosted permaculture workshop “Making Bokashi and Creating a Winter Garden with Sheet Mulch”. Members shown include Agb biotics, Rosie, Wendy and Joseph Wiklund, Leslie Wilson Corsbie, Laurie Niles and Monica Bell. (more…)

This week In a North State Garden had the pleasure of speaking with Stephanie Elliott, her two year old son, Collin, and Laurie Niles - all participants in Cultivating Community, a Chico-based project working to encourage the learning about and growing of good food, locally and on small, home garden and community scales with a long-term goal of improving health in the North Valley. Photo: A community garden supported by Cultivating Community and its partnering organizations. UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED ALL PHOTOS ARE COURTESY OF CULTIVATING COMMUNITY AND THEIR PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS.

According to the Cultivating Community website, the initiative is “a multifaceted project supported by a 2011 California Department of Food and Agriculture Specialty Crop Grant and awarded to CSUC Research Foundation. The project aims to increase food security by serving the Specialty Crop food economy and system needs of low-income residents, local growers, and service agencies.” Photo: Re-sourced signage at the Bidwell Community Garden, supported in part by Cultivating Community and its partnering organizations. (more…)

Renowned American wildflower and native plant advocate Lady Bird Johnson, founder of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in central Texas, once wrote: “Wherever I go in America, I like it when the land speaks its own language in its own regional accent.” But of course in order to hear this language, we need to slow down, stop talking ourselves……and listen. As with any language, if we take just a little time to learn more about it - the language sounds so much more clear and mellifluous to the ear. Photo: Vernal Pool in flower, photo courtesy of Joe Silveiras, all rights reserved 2011. (more…)

On February 27th 2011 the Gateway Science Museum celebrated its one year anniversary of being open to science and nature lovers from around our region. With a stated mission to “create a life-long learning environment that enables people to explore, interpret, and celebrate the magnificent natural heritage of our region through science, research, and education,” the GSM - and its 26,000 visitors in this first year - has “a lot to celebrate!” said Acting Director Rachel Teasdale of the milestone. School groups, summer camps, dynamic exhibits and on-going educational lectures and outreach are all hallmarks of the young museum. (more…)

Bridgette Brick-Wells, founder of the Healthy Lunch & Lifestyles Project working in Shasta, Tehama and Butte Counties; Gina Sims, Garden Coordinator at Chico Country Day Charter School and also working with the Center for Nutrition and Activity Promotion at CSU, Chico; and Debra Abbott, School Garden Educator in the Chico Unified School District as well as with the Chico Area Recreation District (CARD), all joined me for special one-hour live program on Tuesday October 19th from 10 am - 11 am. We discussed how school gardens, farm-to-school connections and healthy school lunch options are sowing the seeds for better life-long physical, cultural, environmental and economic health throughout our region. Photo: Kids in a young gardening program at Chico Christian School in Chico. (more…)

Over the past few weeks I have had several in-depth conversations about plant names. Specifically, why I chose to include scientific plant names across the front of Jewellgarden’s new note cards and how these names are determined - why are they so confusing? All of these conversations got me thinking about plant names - what purpose they serve, why it is important to me to learn them and thus why they proudly embellishing my new cards. Photo: A black and white note card depicting the California black oak acorn (Quercus kelloggii) from my Natives in the Garden series. (more…)

“We had to use all those words,” Kristen del Real explained to me, “Each one was really important to our mission with this project.”

Eat. Learn. Grow.

Together these words are part directive and part blessing - which in many ways is what Chico. Eat. Learn. Grow. is. A hoped-for directive and a blessing for the Chico area, where del Real and Laurie Niles and others working on the initiative saw a strong “need for our area’s food to be more present in our children’s lives, especially at school” where “if a child is on free or reduced fee lunch, they may eat two to three meals at school,” del Real told me. So if school provided food is not particularly healthful, then those children might never eat healthful food. Photo: Kristen del Real (front), co-coordinator of Chico. Eat. Learn. Grow., introducing Bridgette Brick Wells to a recent presentation on the program ot interested community members. (more…)

While there is no regular In a North State Garden radio program this weekend, a this week’s feature essay is the follow-up to the special one-hour Call-In Edition of In a North State Garden that was aired on Thursday March 25th. The resources list was compiled with the help of my panel of guest experts and educators: Lisa Endicott of McConnell Arboretum and Botanical Gardens at Turtle Bay in Redding; Quinn Mendez, teacher with the Agriculture Department at Chico High School and Claudia Randall, an 11th grade Agriculture student at Chico High; and Adrienne Edwards, PhD., Botanist, Ecologist, Arborist, and education chair of the Mt. Lassen chapter of the California Native Plant Society. (more…)

Do you remember when you first realized you were a plant lover? Do you remember when you first became a ‘gardener?’ If you are reading this, chances are you became a love of plants at some fairly definable point: an interaction, a moment, a relationship, a summer, a winter, whether it was as a child or as an adult.

I remember this about learning to love plants - learning that I WAS a gardener: the sticky residue on my finger tips after dead-heading petunias; the peaceful, hushed fragrance and warmth beneath an old ponderosa pine; my mother paying me and my sisters pennies to weed the vegetable garden; my mother sending me at age 7 to the garden to pick spinach for dinner and my returning with a basket of swiss chard - “Do you not know what spinach looks like?” she asked incredulously; turning fuchsia blossoms upside down so that they became fairy dresses; hungrily sucking the sweet nectar from a honeysuckle blossom as we walked to the beach; my bed-ridden grandfather asking me to take his polaroid camera out to the garden to photograph the cherry tree in bloom - just as he had photographed it every year since he had planted it twenty years earlier. Those are some of the imagistic - formative - memories that accumulated into my - from childhood to adulthood - becoming a plant lover, a gardener. What do you remember? (more…)