Willowell Community Garden

Students of our 6 month long, Thriving gardens course, have officially completed 24 weeks of hands on learning and gardening! We finished the course with a sweet potato harvest 🍠 and garlic planting 🧄. The garlic that`s been planted this October will be harvested and enjoyed by next year`s class : )

For graduation we shared a potluck, thoughtful class reflections and many hugs. Everyone enjoyed their gifts of lemon balm glycerate, marshmallow root for tea and seeds for next year`s gardens 🌞

A lot happens in six months time from moving, marriage, engagements, new jobs, and babies being born ! This year we experienced it all, each of us growing alongside each other and the plants we were tending to with love & care🌱 ...

Today`s garlic planting at Seedsong is a symbol of our hopes and dreams for the season ahead. Because this growing season was rough. We worked hard, we laughed, we cried, and still, we continued on as a gardening collective. We invite you to scroll through photos that will take you on the journey of our growing season, highlighting memorable moments and sharing a glimpse into one of VGN`s garden education programs where growing food has grown a tight knit community of gardeners. Captions for each photo are included below, and continue in the comments.

April: One of our goals is to extend the season as long as possible with the minimal infrastructure we have in a small-scale market garden. Overwintering spinach, mache and claytonia allows us to offer garden members harvest in early Spring.

April: We finally got our hands on a tilther to try out user-friendly machinery for low-till market gardening. Our friends at the @intervalecenter lent us their tilther to make the most beautiful, evenly amended, smooth, perfectly sized market garden beds.

May: Every year we dedicate funds and extra effort to a garden improvement project. This year we installed a metal fence to prevent deer from devouring our crops. The timeless saying "many hands make light work" guides our collective organizing and we are immensely grateful for the many hands that helped us put up the fence.

May: Among the 19 garden members of Seedsong, we likely have over 100 photos of beautiful harvest! Here is one of our early season delights: overwintered spinach and purple asparagus spears. Our work-trade agreement with members is that everyone works a 2hr weekly shift in the garden in exchange for whatever is harvestable at the moment.

(continued in comments) ...

Our cover crop at Seedsong is coming in nicely! This peas & oats blend will help restore the soil`s structure and fertility after July`s flood 🌱the peas will fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into a plant available form and the oats will hold onto the N for future use. Both are considered "winter kill" meaning they will die back with the first hard freeze, acting as a nutrient dense mulch to keep your beds covered all winter.

If you have questions about using cover crop at the garden scale, please reach out to us any time! ...

In the spirit of #throwbackthursday we are going to highlight a favorite partner of ours…LEAP (Learn, Earn, and Prosper), a program of RESOURCE.

This past June & July we had the pleasure of welcoming students from this year`s LEAP program to the Thriving Gardens Course teaching garden. LEAP provides pre-employment transitional services to youth and young adults who are blind or visually impaired.

June & July is a busy time in any garden and we are so grateful that LEAP students were able to help us keep our gardens in check. This year`s students have helped with many projects at the garden such as weeding & mulching our communal beds and perennial berries. They also cleaned greenhouse trays to help prevent the spread of disease, made buttons out of old seed catalogs, potted up flower bulbs, and planted a second succession of napa cabbage.

We can`t wait for next year’s group! ...

Registration for a visit from our Veducation Van is now open for the 2024 season! The Veducation Van has been rolling all over Vermont, delivering workshops in every single VT county! Gardeners have been learning with us about Integrated Pest Management, composting, nutrition, growing microgreens throughout the winter, and various other aspects of gardening.

Interested in scheduling a visit? If you think your community could benefit from a visit, sign up at the link in our bio or visit our website. ...

Members of our collective garden, Seedsong, are now spending every Tuesday evening at the market garden @shelburnefarms gardening in exchange for veggies, and having a great time doing it ☀️

Read more about this incredible collaboration and testimonies from Seedsongers at the link in our bio

🥬🍆🥦🍅🥒🌽🫑🥕 ...

Sweet, sweet August. The month of abundance. We love you. 💛☀️🙌

For the gardens that made it through the flood and are persevering through the rain, pest, and disease...August is living up to its name! Swipe through for some seriously big smiles and the most colorful veggies grown and tended to by our Thriving Gardens Course students 🍅 ...

Our Veducation Van will be at the @the.one.ramble this Saturday ! We`re bringing our button maker to make buttons with photos from old seed catalogs, veggie block prints, and a microscope to check out garden goods up close. Great activities for everyone!

Find us at the ONE Community Center parking lot where the "Round Up" event at 5pm! ...

Today we walked through the Seedsong Collective Garden to assess the damage and begin the process of figuring out what to do next. This assessment along with resources from UVM extension and others across the country will help us determine how we move forward. We will keep everyone up to date on our process.

In the meantime, if you are a gardener and your garden has been affected by the flood please refer to our flood resources page (link in our bio) and/or reach out to us with any questions or concerns you may have about how to move forward.

In solidarity 🌱💚🌞 ...

Our beloved collective garden was inundated with flood water from the Winooski river along with our fellow farmers and community gardeners who grow food at the Intervale.

We were able to get out on the water yesterday to see the damage firsthand and, it is truly devastating.

Seedsong collective garden is tended collectively by 20 gardeners, some who`ve taken our Thriving Gardens Course and become mentors and some who are new to growing their own food. Together they`ve planned, planted, tended, harvested, re planted and processed vegetables that have sustained them over the Spring and Summer months. And now, all that work is under contaminated water 😔

We are not 100% sure where to go from here or what is possible moving forward. We did compile helpful resources on what to do with crops after a flood (access at the link in our bio) and continue to water our greenhouse plants of hope. All that we can do now is wait for the water to drain, soil to dry, and for soil tests results to come in. This will help infer what`s possible.

Our hearts ache for our plant, insect, animal, and grower friends but we will move through this! In solidarity 💚

@new_farms_for_new_americans
@btvparks community gardens
@intervalecenter
@intervalecommunityfarm
@pitchforkfarm
@junefarm_
@diggersmirthcollectivefarm
@sugarsnapvt ...

Today marked the start of a new adventure ! We started our own seeds to supply our programming with a bountiful fall harvest. Thank you @new_farms_for_new_americans for lending us the space in your greenhouse so we can begin this seed starting journey.

This will be a pilot year for our upcoming community greenhouse project; stay tuned for more details. And if you become a member today you will be directly supporting the internal build of the greenhouse! To become a member sign up at the link in the bio 🌱 ...