Have you tried growing garlic in your garden yet? It’s an easy, fall-planted crop that usually has great success in our area. The Community Garden Coalition is sponsoring a free workshop with an expert in garlic growing. Dhruba Dhakal is an MU Extension specialist AND a longtime community gardener who has grown many, many a head of garlic in his plot at Ash St. garden.
Mark your calendar for August 28 and join us for this free workshop for community gardeners or anyone who’d like to learn!
Garlic Production Workshop Monday, August 28 6 p.m. Columbia Public Library, Friends Room 100 W. Broadway, Columbia, MO 65201
If you can’t make it to the workshop, check out this how-to post from a former CGC board member: Gearing Up for Garlic. This workshop is part of our celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Community Garden Coalition. Thank you for your continued interest and support!
As of our mission to help community gardeners, this year we’ve been focusing on educational opportunities. We’ve offered several workshops with other partners as part of our 40th anniversary celebrations. We also want to let you know about the following free or low-cost classes offered by University Extension presenters to help you deal with drought in your garden, learn how to store your harvest and improve your compost pile.
Check out the following offerings and follow the links to register. Another composting workshop is being planned in early August at our Unite4Health garden, so stay tuned for more information!
Workshop on Drought Management in Garden Plants
Wednesday, July 12, 6-8 p.m. 1012 N. Highway UU, Columbia, MO 65203 Cost: FREE Register at this link.
In this workshop, horticulture producers and gardeners will learn about the effect of drought and heat on garden plants. They will also learn about how to minimize the drought effect in the garden plants in the workshop.
Home Food Preservation – Harvesting and Storing Fresh Produce
Friday, July 21, 12-1:30 p.m. 2nd floor, 105 E Ash Street, Columbia, MO 65203 OR Live via Zoom Cost: $20 Register at this link. (Registration closes Tuesday, July 18 at 11 p.m.)
This course will look at current standards for harvesting and storing fresh produce as well as hands-on preparation of a seasonal recipe. Participants may either attend in-person or online via Zoom. Participants who attend online must be able to pick-up a grocery bag of food to be prepared from the MU Family Impact Center in Columbia, MO.
Composting Workshop
Monday, July 24, 6-8 p.m. 1012 N. Highway UU, Columbia, MO 65203 Cost: FREE Register at this link.
Participants will learn about benefits of compost in the soil, source of composting materials, good materials, and materials to avoid during composting. The speaker will talk about the greens and browns materials used during composting. Participants will learn about methods of composting, site selection for compost pile and compost testing in this program.
We’re so excited to be co-sponsoring a gardener education workshop this month with the Columbia Public Library! Clear your calendar for Saturday, June 24 and see the details below. No need to register and all gardeners and community members are welcome, teens and adults!
Garden Pests and Pollinators: How to Manage for Both in Your Home and Community Garden
Saturday, June 24 at 2-3:30 p.m. Columbia Public Library, Friends Room, 100 W. Broadway
Mid-Missouri gardeners are bedeviled by all kinds of pests, from tomato hornworms to Japanese beetles, throughout the growing season. The ongoing challenge is to fight back against these pests, while encouraging the presence of the bees, butterflies and moths who pollinate your plants! Joe Walls from the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture and Dana Morris from Central Methodist University will share their know-how at this presentation. Joe will share natural pest management tips for home and community gardeners. Dana, who has worked extensively with monarch butterfly recovery, will present on “Thinking Like a Bee: Planting and Planning for Habitat.”
Joe Walls received his master’s degree in entomology as well in plant pathology and environmental microbiology from Penn State University. During graduate school, he studied integrated pest and disease management for plant viruses and their insect vectors, with special focus on climate change. Since finishing his graduate studies he has worked at Happy Hollow Farm and currently works at Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture. He specializes in pest and disease management plans as well as farm systems maintenance and construction.
Dana Morris earned her B.S and M.S. in fisheries and wildlife sciences and a Ph.D. in biology from MU studying avian ecology. She worked for the Missouri Department of Conservation and the Department of Natural Resources in water quality and outreach education. She taught for 4 years in the School of Natural Resources at Mizzou, worked as a post-doc studying savannah ecology in Kenya and as a post-doc for the Missouri Ozark Forest Ecosystem Project before joining the faculty at Central Methodist University in Fayette, MO in 2012. Since 2014, she has been restoring an 86-acre university-owned nature sanctuary with native habitat to better support biodiversity, pollinators and an outdoor classroom. In her own garden, she grows just enough produce for her family and several families of wild animal neighbors.
This workshop is part of our series of gardener education workshops celebrating our 40th anniversary.
This program provides education to the local gardeners about soil and nutrient management in their gardens. The speaker will talk about function and composition of soil, and soil organic matter. The standard procedure for soil sampling will be discussed in the meeting. There will be discussion about essential plant nutrients, soil test report interpretation and fertilizer application.
Interested participants need to register online or call to Boone County Extension Center at (573) 445-9792.
This Saturday’s workshop at Friendship Community Garden will go ahead despite the weather! We hope you’ll bundle up against the chill and join us to learn about square-foot gardening and rain barrels!
Learn about square-foot gardening and DIY rain barrels at this demonstration event. Square-foot gardening is a popular method of growing an intensive vegetable garden in less space. It is also very water and resource-efficient. Visit a working square-foot garden and discuss how to fit in all your favorite veggies. Gary Carter of Friendship garden will also discuss how he sourced and installed the DIY rain barrels that help gardeners water there.
Participants will get a free space-saving heirloom tomato seedling!
This event is part of our celebrations of our 40th Anniversary! More events will be announced soon!
It’s the 40th year for the Community Garden Coalition, and to celebrate we’re organizing some public workshops on various gardening topics all season long! Please note that as our plans have come into focus, our small space gardening workshop events have changed from their original dates. There will no longer be a workshop on April 8 or May 13 as was originally planned.
Instead, please join us to learn about small space gardening and DIY rain barrels on the following date:
Learn about square-foot gardening and DIY rain barrels at this demonstration event.
Square-foot gardening is a popular method of growing an intensive vegetable garden in less space. It is also very water and resource-efficient. Visit a working square-foot garden and discuss how to fit in all your favorite veggies. Gary Carter of Friendship garden will also discuss how he sourced and installed the DIY rain barrels that help gardeners water there.
Participants will get a free space-saving heirloom tomato seedling!
Our earlier spring workshops focused on learning how to prune the fruit trees and elderberry bushes that make a nice addition on the margins of some of our community gardens. Thanks to our board member Mallary Lieber for leading those events!
We hope you’re able to get your garden ready and growing soon!
Update 4/2: Please note, our small space gardening workshops have been reformulated and will no longer take place on April 8 & May 13. Watch for more details about an April workshop soon!
Our series of workshops for our gardeners and other interested community members continues, but tomorrow’s event will be postponed! Here’s more information on that and our next event.
Elderberry Pruning Workshop NEW DATE: Saturday, March 18, 2:30 p.m. Kilgore’s Community Garden, 700 N. Providence Rd. Because of the forecast for rain on Saturday, March 11, we’re moving to our rain date of March 18. Still free and open to all! Participants will learn how to prune elderberries, a wonderful native fruiting plant, and go home with a cutting along with instructions about how and where to plant. Led by Mallary Lieber of the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture and the Community Garden Coalition.
Small Space Gardening Workshops Saturdays April 8 & May 13, 2:30 p.m. Friendship Community Garden, 1707 Smiley Lane Get tips and tricks on fitting all your favorite vegetables into a 4×4′ garden. Visit a working square-foot garden, practice planting with a square-foot grid, and strategize succession planting for the best harvest. Participants will receive Tom Thumb lettuce seeds at the April workshop and an heirloom tomato space-saving seedling at the May workshop.
Update: Our rain date for the Elderberry Pruning Workshop will be Saturday, March 18!
Kicking off the gardening season, this year, the Community Garden Coalition held our first in-person garden leaders meeting in three years last month! It was great to see everyone in person again! If you’re a leader of a neighborhood OR a school garden who missed out, we can’t offer you any of the tasty meal catered by Beet Box, BUT, we do have posted the packet of information shared at the meeting. Be sure to check it out on our Resources for Garden Leaders page if you want to know more about how to get resources or funding for your garden this year.
We have also started a series of workshops for our gardeners and other interested community members in celebration of our 40th anniversary. The workshops will take place throughout the 2023 growing season at various sites. On February 18, we held our first event, a fruit tree pruning workshop led by Mallary Lieber of the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture and the Community Garden Coalition.
Our next event is an Elderberry Pruning Workshop with Mallary THIS SATURDAY, March 11 at 2:30 p.m. at Kilgore’s Community Garden, 700 N. Providence Rd. Participants will learn how to prune elderberries, a wonderful native fruiting plant, and go home with a cutting along with instructions about how and where to plant.
We’ll share more details soon about other opportunities on topics like straw bale gardening, small space gardens, kids in the garden, pests, encouraging pollinators & native plants!
We’re also hard at work on a new shed project at the Claudell garden and getting ready to distribute seeds and cool season plants to member gardens. Stay tuned!
This year is the 40th anniversary of the Community Garden Coalition, and we are off to a great start due to some very successful year-end fundraising!
We exceeded our goal of $6,000 through CoMoGives and received corporate gifts from two local Walmarts totalling $2,750 along with a $500 gift from UScellular. But the most surprising donation happened in early December when we were contacted by Jim Robertson, the chair of the Reality House Programs board of directors.
Reality House operated as a local, non-profit for 50 years offering a community-based alternative to incarceration. Unfortunately it lost the state funding it relied on two years ago and had to shut down. As a last gift to the Columbia community the board of directors decided the best way to disburse their remaining funds was to donate to three local, non-profits that they felt had supported their clientele over the years. The Community Garden Coalition was one of the lucky recipients, and we were given a $10,000 donation!!
Needless to say, we can help a lot of people with such a generous gift! While we are grateful for everyone’s support, we want to especially thank the Reality House Programs board of directors:
We are thrilled to report that the Coalition has received over $6,000 in donations this year through our CoMoGives campaign!!! We also received some other donations in December, and we’re so grateful to all our donors!
These gifts mean A LOT to our small, all-volunteer organization! We are so happy to have community support and enthusiasm for our mission as we move into our 40th year as an organization! (That’s right, the CGC got its start in 1983!)
Of course, if you meant to donate and missed the CoMoGives deadline, please know that you can donate anytime via our PayPal donations portal.
We wish all of our gardeners, volunteers and supporters a Happy New Year. We hope you can spend this winter planning your best garden ever!
Community Garden Coalition 