The Living School is an open enrollment public high school in New Orleans east.
It is project based. It is beyond what I could have imagined. The school is interdisciplinary
and is very deeply involved in environmental stewardship. I'm excited to have my students
use a computer aided drafting program in order to create an aquaponics grow system. I'm excited
that they can be able to explore what it means and what it takes to use an aquaponics system
and also how they can maximize the growth of their crops and how they can maximize the growth of the
beneficials that they end up using in the products that they sell at a market. I'm doubly excited
for them to realize that this can just be a new way of growing in the future. My students
are here to reclaim nature as all humans are suffering from a nature deficit syndrome. We're
scared of nature... we don't interact with it. I want the students to be able to interact with the land.
We're on a landfill... basically there's nothing that we can do with it. We can't build
on it. It's basically just hills of trash, grass, and weeds is basically all it is.
Sustainability Matters called in the office and introduced the idea of a
flower plot. When Sari came to us about this plot, we did an experimental spot
for people to stop and see and identify what flowers are blooming and what's happening.
Right now we're in March in Virginia, so the native perennials are dormant but in a few
months, this pilot plot, which was set up along the road so that everyone would be able to see it,
will be blooming in all different colors. This summer we have plans supported by Mountain
Rose Herbs funds to hold a couple of socially distanced, in-person workshops here at the landfill...
dump truck just went by... One of the workshops will be for healthcare professionals and it will be
an introduction to herbalism using native plants taught by one of our volunteers who's an herbalist.
Another one will be for teachers and their families they will be learning about the
importance of native plants and pollinators in the ecosystem and hopefully passing that information
on to their students.
Florence Fang Community Farm is San Francisco's largest community farm with 100
volunteer farmers and 200 regular participants. Our herbal engagement program with Mountain Rose Herbs
will showcase the healthy and herbal lifestyles of our elder volunteers, some ages 70 and up.
Our herbal engagement program with Mountain Rose Herbs also brings youth to the farm to
work alongside the elder volunteers to learn about growing vegetables and herbs.
A partnership with Mountain Rose Herbs Grants 4 Plants program
will help our garden share this idyllic vision with local residents and thousands of followers.
We will further spread herbal medicinal education, healthful living practices,
environmental stewardship ideals, and community building opportunities. Thank you.
Shepard's Table is a non-profit organization in downtown Silver Spring
in Maryland where we provide services for people experiencing homelessness or living in poverty.
I have recently started a garden at home on my balcony and there just wasn't enough space. So,
my dream is to be able to use the garden as an outdoor classroom for some of our clients so
that they can learn to be a little bit more self-sustainable once they do get housing.
This year, we are putting in a greenhouse. So we will be adding a whole bunch of tables around
the greenhouse, once that gets installed, so we can... we'll be more than doubling what we're able
to produce for our clients. So that's very, very exciting! Last year we added a compost bin,
so we've been using that. We've been adding compost to it, so it should be ready to add to
our beds here in the next month or two. So very very exciting things happening in the garden.
We started a partnership with a local urban farm, Koiner Farms, and, uh, they will be working with
us to help develop a curriculum so that we can get started teaching our clients how to garden in
the next, you know, hopefully in the next year, and they've been, you know, very instrumental in helping
us plan for this upcoming growing season. So we're very, very excited about all the things going on
around the garden here at Shepherd's Table. Thank you for your help.
Sustainable G's is all about believing that people have enough to get started
wherever they are. In San Antonio, there is a high rate of poverty, it's one of the most
divided cities in the nation, in addition to that is one of the most food insecure locations
in the United States. We need another system to empower people to do more with what they have
and then come together as a community to build together and build gardens. It's been a rough,
rough road with the Texas snowstorm that hit us in February. A lot of things were lost when we
were just getting started. So we took some time to regroup and replan and came back a little
bit stronger in April. And so here we are with some of our boxes. We have five boxes in total right
now. We got our good old spring and summer plants that are in here... pretty excited. We have a variation
of herbs as well as peppers, bell peppers, some squash, really excited. The herb of the year
is parsley, so we have a lot of parsley that we'll be talking about in workshops and classes. We did
a campaign around getting people out and moving and caring about their community to do clean ups
as well as to donate plants to the garden. So we're super, super excited and just ready to get started
with more people coming out now that the weather is back to normal... hot and hotter for Texas!
Thanks!