Everybody Grows Highlights 2019

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This year, Everybody Grows continued to invest in our core community projects. We deepened our relationships with partners and participants and improved our growing methods. We are deeply excited to build on these projects as well as expand in the coming year! Please enjoy these highlights and pictures.

Scotland Recreation: Garden and (new!) Nature Trail  In 2019, we continued to develop our vegetable garden adjacent to the Scotland Recreation Center. We hosted children of all ages on a weekly basis in programs designed to teach them about the joys of vegetable gardening and eating freshly picked foods. We also continued our successful nature and foraging youth program. In the spring, we partnered with Montgomery County Parks and Recreation to open a new nature trail for the community to use, giving them easy access to Cabin John Park. The trail has allowed our expert naturalist Andrew Shofer to lead the weekly programs for the community, surrounded by trees and fresh air.

Engine 26: Feeding our Firefighters  We had a productive season at our fire station farm! We produced an abundance of food for firefighters and created an inspiring outdoor classroom to share with school groups and organizations about urban growing. We now have a dozen raised beds at the fire station. We grew a significant variety of produce, including summer vegetables such as cucumbers, tomatoes, strawberries, eggplants, radishes, herbs, zucchinis, green beans and fall vegetables such as cabbage, snap peas, lettuce, beets, herbs and radishes. The produce is used primarily by the firefighters and emergency personnel who live and work out of this busy station and the garden space has been shared this year with groups including Sidwell Friends Middle School. There is a productive three-bin compost system which we have used to enrich the beds.  

Fort Stanton: Growing with the Community The garden at the Fort Stanton Recreation Center in Ward 8 really took off this summer! What started several years ago as an abandoned plot with depleted soil has now became an engine of productive gardening. This summer, the garden space in the rear of the facility featured vegetables and herbs used by a group of older adult patrons of the Recreation Center, primarily through the Chat & Chew program. The spring crop of potatoes and greens was followed by a cornucopia of summer vegetables, including yellow squash, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers, okra, and tomatoes. Notable successes included a fall planting of garlic, harvested in June, along with beautiful eggplants harvested in August and September.

Backyard Garden Initiative Everybody Grows dedicated a day this past summer for building raised garden beds for community members in SE, DC for their backyard gardens. These community members, primarily from the Fort Stanton Rec Center, enjoyed being able to grow food right in their backyards for themselves and their families.  

We look forward to another great year working with communities across D.C. to grow food together. Stay tuned for more information about future programming and ways that you can volunteer and support Everybody Grows in 2020! 

2018 Garden Report

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2018 has been another fruitful year for us at Everybody Grows! We have continued to focus on our most successful inspiration gardens, while also developing and refining how we perform community outreach and organizing. In this report we will look back on our progress in 2018 with each of our active projects.

To stay abreast of our ongoing work please follow us on instagram and facebook. Please consider donating at everybodygrows.org/donate-today/ to support our mission to inspire and equip people to grow fresh, healthy food by bringing the home garden to everybody, wherever home may be.

ST. GABRIEL’S CATHOLIC CHURCH

Everybody Grows started a new collaboration during the Spring of 2018 with the Green Team at St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church in the Petworth neighborhood of Northwest DC. The Green Team, many of whom live in the neighborhood, sought assistance from Everybody Grows in turning a vacant area behind the church into a thriving community garden for church members. With our help, more than a dozen parishioners built seven large raised bed gardens in the spring and thereafter, with a little coaching, successfully grew a variety of vegetables and herbs. With our assistance, the Green Team hopes to expand the garden in 2019 and to inspire members of their ethnically and age diverse community to grow something at their homes.

FORT STANTON RECREATION CENTER

For the second year, Everybody Grows has supported a vegetable garden at the Fort Stanton Recreation Center on Erie Street in Southeast, DC. The garden is enthusiastically led by Louis Jones, an employee of the District of Columbia Department of Parks and Recreation. He is assisted by seniors who live in the neighborhood and regularly attend programs at the recreation center. The garden successfully produced a variety of vegetables (tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, potatoes, kale, chard, greens) and herbs that are primarily used by the seniors attending a lunch program at the recreation center.

Late this past summer, Everybody Grows expanded our relationship with the Fort Stanton community by holding garden-related activities for groups of younger children attending summer camp at the recreation center. These learning experiences took place both in the garden and in the classroom, where the children were exposed, some for the first time, to the joy of growing their own food. Everybody Grows hopes to establish a weekly garden learning activity with the summer camp participants in 2019, thereby expanding its commitment to this neighborhood.

SCOTLAND RECREATION CENTER

2018 marked the third year we have been working with the children and staff at Scotland Recreation Center.  The recreation center is located in a low income apartment complex in Potomac, Maryland. We have continued to work with this community every other Friday afternoon through the growing season, to tend their garden together and to foster a stronger connection to nature and to healthy, fresh food. 

We made significant improvements in the garden’s infrastructure this year. We build a third raised bed with the children. We created a durable, tall fence to protect the garden from deer. We led an art project where children painted CD’s and hung them on the fence to deter birds and beautify the space. We also mulched the paths, to suppress the grass growing around the beds and created more of a garden classroom environment.

Harvesting food for cooking projects continued to be a regular feature of our programs. We harvested basil that we turned into pesto, rainbow chard that we stir fried, greens for a salad, and steamed string beans. The garlic we harvested from this garden in the early summer was a key ingredient to many of these recipes.

This fall we have refocused on our nature program. Our naturalist Andrew Shofer led a half-day nature program for Scotland children in neighboring Cabin John Park on November 6th.  During the program we explored the stream and and shared about wild plants, primitive skills, and practices for observing and interacting with more wild environments.  We ended by making a fire together  in one of the park’s fire pits and roasting apples.  

DC FIRE STATION ENGINE 26

Our partnership with DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services continued in 2018 and was centered around our garden at fire station Engine 26 at 1340 Rhode Island Ave, NE. We continued to expand our garden at this fire station in 2018, as well as growing our outreach to firefighters and the wider community. We made notable infrastructure improvements by replacing three aging beds and constructing two additional new beds, bringing the total number of garden beds to ten. This work was undertaken with us by volunteers from Sidwell Friends Middle School. The new beds and our drip irrigation system contributed to make this the most productive year of this garden. This fall we are planning to mulch all the pathways with volunteers to improve aesthetics and prevent weeds.

In order to make use of the large yield of produce, we harvested with firefighters, shared recipes, and checked in regularly on how they were using the food. We led projects indoors with them including pickling cucumbers and peppers as well as braiding garlic from the large garlic harvest this site produced.  

While the main intention of this garden in past years has been to make a meaningful contribution to improving firefighter health, we learned that the yield is often larger than the firefighters can use in any given day. We will be seeking a community partner such as a food bank in 2019 to make use of the extra food.   

The compost system has seen light usage in processing food waste from the fire station and the neighbors, and we are currently using it to process garden waste and produce compost for next year. We recently added upgraded signage that we hope will become an invitation for more firefighters to successfully use it.

In early October we worked with Edmund Burke Middle School to clear the summer crops and are in the process of planting winter vegetables in beds and winterizing others with cover crops.

Backyard Garden Initiative

In 2018, Everybody Grows expanded its small initiative to help individuals grow veggies in their yards or on their apartment balconies. As the result of an introduction made by Thorne Rankin of DC Natives, we were able  to assist 12 women, all of whom live in Ward 7 and most of whom attend a program at the Therapeutic Recreation Center on G Street S.E. We helped some participants by constructing raised bed gardens in their yards, others by providing and helping them plant organic seeds and seedlings, and we provided all participants with feedback on how to best reach their individual gardening goals. We were aided in this effort by Jamila Stone, a student at UDC with gardening experience, who we hired to provide support for those participants who are elderly or infirm. By also adding a raised bed for vegetables to the existing pollinator gardens previously constructed by DC Natives at the Therapeutic Recreation Center, we hope to continue our collaboration with the gardening community in that neighborhood next summer.

 

Everybody Grows 2017 End of Year Report

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Everybody Grows 2017 End of Year Report

2017 was a year of significant progress for Everybody Grows. We expanded our reach by helping a group of neighbors living on 31st Street NE to start and maintain their own personal vegetable gardens. We significantly increased the learning opportunities for the children in the Scotland community through our Scotland Recreation Center garden program. We established new gardens at both the Fort Stanton Recreation Center and Dorothy Day Place.  Through our successful partnership with DC Fire and EMS, we taught gardening skills to numerous volunteers, and demonstrated how to grow and eat a variety of fresh produce throughout the spring, summer and fall.

With your assistance, we hope to continue our success in 2018.  If you feel inspired to donate to support our work, please click here.

We invite you to read this brief report on each of our activities in 2017 below.

1. Individual Gardens

It has long been our goal to connect our knowledge of gardening with individuals interested in growing something to eat for themselves. Through our friendship with Janie Boyd, a long term food advocate in DC, we were able to help individuals living on 31st Street NE, to plant and maintain their own personal gardens. These individuals grew tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and herbs for their own personal consumption, and ornamental flowers that beautified their yards. There is a high demand for gardens. We are raising funds and hope to expand our presence in this neighborhood in 2018.

Community organizers Janie Boyd and Brad Ogilvie have been instrumental in developing the backyard garden program with us

2. Scotland Recreation Center

2017 marked our second year of programming at the Scotland Recreation Center, located in the Scotland subsidized housing community in Montgomery County, Maryland. Our first year was supported by a grant from the Whole Foods’ Whole Kids Foundation. Our activities complement a dynamic after school program at the center that takes place mostly indoors.

Cooking the produce we grew was an important part of the Scotland Program

Steve shares his 30 years of gardening experience with children at Scotland

This fall, we continued gardening with the children and also added the new elements of nature awareness and woods exploration, with great success. We had a long growing season due to a warm early fall, and were able to continue harvesting peppers, tomatoes, marigolds, and squash into November. The children especially loved finding the giant squash hidden among its leaves, tasting the hot peppers, watering the garden, and picking flowers to decorate the community center. We also taught some awareness games to play by the garden, and brought the “nature museum” – a box with bones, antlers, feathers, and other cool nature objects – which was a huge hit. Once the plants began to die back for the winter, we pulled everything out together and planted garlic in one bed and cover crops in the other. The children were able to see and experience a full cycle of the garden.

Everybody Grows works with naturalists Andrew Shofer and Tori Heller on the nature program for Scotland. They are constantly finding new wonders and projects that amaze and inspire the children.

We also created a space in the woods behind the community center for nature programs. Over the course of several weeks, Everybody Grows staff cleared a circle in the forest. We cut down trees, built a rock fire pit, and raked a path with the kids. Every time we showed up at Scotland, they were so excited to go into the woods. Once gardening was done for the season, we journeyed back to our circle and began building a shelter, climbed trees, and wove a grass mat together to go inside of a shelter. We also demonstrated fire-by-friction, and let the children have a try on a bow drill kit. It was amazing to see them so excited to get their hands dirty and engage with the natural world.

Our first group trip down to Cabin John stream at Scotland. Many of the children had never made the short walk down to this beautiful area, which made this even more special.

With the help of a generous donation from Christopher and Lauren Mead, who introduced Everybody Grows to Scotland, we will continue growing edibles and exploring nature with our Scotland gardeners in 2018.

3. Fort Stanton Recreation Center

We began our work in the Fort Stanton community by gardening with the Ladies Auxiliary at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church. Unable to sustain that garden in 2017, we ventured down the street to the Fort Stanton Recreation Center, where Mr. Louis Jones, who runs a variety of programs for the DC Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR), was interested in reviving a defunct garden. Everybody Grows, with the help of volunteers, cleared the site that was overgrown with weeds, and enriched the soil with Bloom, a soil amendment produced, and offered free-of-charge, by the Blue Plains wastewater treatment plant. The garden was a tremendous success. It provided hundreds of pounds of produce for use by community members attending learning and health-related programs at the recreation center. We hope not only to repeat our success in 2018, but to involve many more people who use the services provided by the center.

The garden at Fort Stanton was highly productive this year thanks to the efforts of the recreation center director and the local senior community.

4. Dorothy Day Place

Dorothy Day Place is a single adult transitional shelter that functions as a crucial bridge between homelessness and permanent housing for both men and women. In 2017, Everybody Grows planted a vegetable garden in eight large garden pouches located just outside the front door of the Dorothy Day Place building on Marinelli Road in Rockville, Md. We were not sure who would actually benefit from the lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and variety of herbs that we planted – the geese nesting nearby, the pedestrians walking up the street, or the residents (or all of the above). As it turns out, with the help of several residents including one experienced gardener, the garden thrived and the residents were able to supplement their diet with food they grew for themselves. Everybody Grows plans to double the size of the garden and to expand the variety of produce grown in 2018.

Staff and residents helped tend the new garden with us at Dorothy Day Place

5. The DC Fire and EMS partnership

We had our biggest harvest ever this year at E26

We continued our fruitful partnership with DC Fire and Emergency Services (DCFEMS) by focusing on our largest fire station inspiration garden at Engine House 26 (E26). In 2017 at E26, we expanded food production, worked with a diverse set of volunteer groups, and started an onsite compost cooperative in partnership with DC Parks and Recreation. We began the year by constructing, filling, and planting three new raised beds with volunteer groups from Howard University and Sidwell Friends Middle School. Everybody Grows staff installed a new irrigation system that watered all eight beds automatically. The garden was highly productive, yielding an abundance of sweet potatoes, okra, tomatoes, greens, cucumbers, strawberries, culinary herbs, and other crops that we harvested with the firefighters, children from the neighborhood, and volunteer groups including the DCJCC. The produce was consumed primarily by the firefighters at E26 as part of our efforts to improve firefighter health, with portions of the yield also returned to volunteers and community groups. Our new compost system and cooperative began operation, with firefighters and a handful of engaged community members adding food and garden waste to the bin in order to grow soil for next year’s garden.

 

Planting Herbs and Writing Tunes at Scotland Rec

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We collaborated with a group of young gardeners to start our first plants at our new inspiration garden at Scotland Recreation Center.  We are really excited about our new inspiration garden there, and we are off to a great start building a partnership with the staff and children at the recreation center. I want to thank Whole Foods and their Whole Kids Foundation for generously supporting this project with their Extend Learning Garden Grant.

We kicked off the season by planting six herb plants in two large containers.  It was fun to provide a hands-on activity to start the growing season with the children.IMG_1218

Our first step was to get to know the herb plants by smelling them and touching them.  I chose cold-hardy herbs that the deer avoid, including spearmint, peppermint, dill, lemon balm, lavender and oregano.

Next I had them fill the bottoms of the containers with rocks to help with drainage and to conserve soil.
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The children worked in groups of two to lift up bags of potting soil and pour them on top of the rocks.

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We added water before filling the pot to the top in order to create more evenly moist soil.  We topped off the pots, and it was time to plant.  Each pot received three different variety of herb seedlings.IMG_1243

They suggested we plant the seedlings in a triangle shape, and dug holes first where they thought each plant should live.IMG_1245We finished our gardening by watering of course, but before we watered we added the extra rocks to the top of the soil for aesthetics and as a mulch.   Rocks also hold heat, so they will help keep the soil warm during the cool month of April.IMG_1247 But the fun wasn’t over yet.  We had a nice jam session and made up a few songs about gardening.  The children took turns playing my dulcitar, which is my favorite instrument to bring to the garden because of its light weight and its twangy sound.  One of our Scotland gardeners wrote a short song about planting and pest management.  Listen here:

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The pots looked great and we moved them out to the garden, where they received a nice serenade.IMG_1257

Our next steps together will be to fill the beds and plan the layout of our summer vegetable garden.

Here’s to a spring full of growing together.

Best wishes,

Jake

Getting Started with Garden Composting

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As our summer gardening finishes and we begin the transition to fall, now is a great time to start a garden composter to reuse your garden’s organic materials.   We are using a geobin composter at my school garden, which is a low maintenance, inexpensive composter designed for garden waste and a few other materials such as vegetable scraps, fruit peels, shredded cardboard, and coffee grounds.  If you use the geobin correctly, it produces no strong odor and does not attract pests, it will produce rich compost for your garden by the spring.  I definitely recommend it for a first attempt at composting if you have a small home garden.   

Not every weed or plant can go in the composter successfully.  This article gives a great overview of how to incorporate leaves in your composter and what plants to avoid.   A few quick tips from the article are to not put weeds that have gone to seed in the composter or plants that are diseased or insect infected.

Happy composting!