The new Lucky’s Market grocery opening this week at Broadway & Providence has offered to donate to the Community Garden Coalition proceeds from one of their fundraising programs. For each reusable shopping bag used, Lucky’s will give shoppers a wooden token that can be placed in collection buckets on the way out the door; the tokens are periodically counted and a sum donated to the appropriate nonprofit.

While we’re in the deep freeze, it’s a good time to dream about next year’s garden. And, clearly, some of you are already making plans because we’ve started to receive a few requests for new plots in 2014. We will forward your requests to garden leaders, but be aware that many leaders may not be focused yet on gardening and it could take a little longer to hear back.

While we wait for the thaw, there’s also some old business to report on. This fall, the CGC and a number of partners were recognized for bringing community gardening to more people in Columbia and Boone County. The Columbia/Boone County Department of Public Health and Human Services gave Healthy Community Partnership Awards to Mike Heimos (second from the left), City of Columbia stormwater educator; Bill McKelvey (third from the right), past president of the CGC; and Jenny Grabner (second from the right) and Liz Austin (far right), representatives of the Southern Boone Learning Garden.

The Community Garden Coalition was also honored to receive an award from Peaceworks during their Annual Dinner on November 2. Many thanks to Mark Haim and the Peaceworks Steering Committee for the recognition!

The CGC is sad to hear of the death of community gardener Mike Onofrio. Mike and his wife Barb have gardened for several years at the N. Ninth St. garden. In addition to raising an impressive crop of peppers, eggplants, greens, peas, beans and more, Mike and Barb have been stalwart volunteers helping to keep the garden maintained and organized. Mike’s cheerful nature and inquisitive good humor will be sorely missed at the garden. Our hearts go out to Mike’s family and friends.

A visitation will be held from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, at Memorial Funeral Home with a memorial service immediately following at 7 p.m.

Barb has asked that memorial contributions be made to the CGC. We thank her for that and will do our best to honor Mike’s memory by helping existing and future gardens to flourish and providing more people with access to fresh, homegrown food. You can make a donation here. (There is a place to leave a note on the confirmation page of your PayPal transaction to designate your donation in honor of Mike.)

(Mike’s obituary)

We just wanted to say a slightly belated, but very heartfelt “Thank You” to everybody who came out to our fundraising night at Chipotle at the end of August! We made a very tidy sum and the nice folks at Chipotle made it all so easy for us.

And, you know, maybe it’s a good time to mention that if your community or school garden is looking to make any improvements or replace any equipment, fall is a great time to do that. CGC would like to help member gardens pay for improvements, just have your garden leader put in a request and we’ll see what we can do.