Community Kitchen Garden: First Harvest!

Community Kitchen Garden: First Harvest!
by Janine Butler, garden volunteer
The volunteers and staff continue to work hard in the vegetable garden; weeding, mulching, feeding, watering and what not, and finally we are starting to reap the rewards!
Last week the first harvest was picked and delivered to Central Virginia Foodbank/ FeedMore, the recipients of all the food [...]

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Community Kitchen Garden: United We Serve

Community Kitchen Garden: United We Serve
By Janine Butler, garden volunteer
We are getting close to our first harvest! According to Tom Brinda, Assistant Executive Director of Horticulture here at Lewis Ginter, the first of the summer squash are almost ready! They are quite small, but apparently they taste better when they are smaller. In some circles [...]

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Community Kitchen Garden: Tomato Suckers and More!

Community Kitchen Garden: Tomato Suckers and More!
By Janine Butler, garden volunteer
Do you know what I love about this volunteer gig? Every time I go to the garden I learn something new – this week was all about tomatoes (and yes, I say tom-ah-toe, not tom-ate-er).
Tom Brinda, Assistant Executive Director of Horticulture at Lewis Ginter asked [...]

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Community Kitchen Garden: Weeds and Bugs – Two Guaranteed Occurrences in Gardening!

by Janine Butler, garden volunteer
In last week’s blog, I commented on how well all the plants had been growing over the last couple of weeks.  Well guess what else has been growing?  Yep, WEEDS!  I spent a good hour or so on Saturday using a cool tool called a scuffle hoe – you move [...]

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Community Kitchen Garden: Look What’s Growing!

Community Kitchen Garden:  Look What’s Growing! by Janine Butler, garden volunteer What a difference a couple of weeks can make!  Look at these pictures that were taken this morning:
The squash seeds that we planted a couple of weeks ago are doing great.  I can’t believe that they could grow so big in such [...]

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Community Kitchen Garden: Planting Day Success!

By Janine Butler, garden volunteer
Today was awesome!   About a hundred people participated in the celebration planting day this morning, including a group of 20  4- and 5-year-old students from New Directions Daycare.
It was great fun watching the children get in the dirt and plant cabbages, bell peppers, eggplant and tomatoes.  It comes so natural to children – they have no [...]

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Community Kitchen Garden: Are you a Locavore?

by Janine Butler, garden volunteer
　In November 2007 the Oxford University Press announced locavore as the Word of the Year.  No, until recently I had never heard of it either.  But now it seems that I keep hearing, and reading, the word ‘locavore’ more and more often.
What is a locavore?  One definition from Dictionary.com: a person [...]

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Community Kitchen Garden: Planting Day is May 14th!

by Janine Butler, garden volunteer
Planting day has been scheduled!  If you’d like to come witness the planting of the Community Kitchen Garden at Lewis Ginter,  mark your calendars for Thursday,  May 14 from 9:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.  It promises to be a fun event, with local schoolchildren stopping by to help plant as well [...]

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Community Kitchen Garden: Plans for Planting

by Janine Butler,  garden volunteer
I went to a local store at the weekend with my neighbor, Susan, who was buying a few plants for her own home vegetable garden.  She bought a cool looking yellow tomato, a pepper, and a cucumber, and she already has some squash at home that she started from seeds a [...]

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Community Kitchen Garden: Breaking Ground

by Janine Butler, Garden volunteer
You may have already heard some of the buzz about an exciting new project here at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden — the plan is to plant a Community Kitchen Garden and grow 10,000 pounds of fresh produce this growing season, with all the produce from this garden being donated to Central [...]

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