✨Our 9th Garden Year🤗

This year will be the garden’s 9th year in operation. We have some exciting events and opportunities planned, and would like your help creating even more. The garden won’t open until mid/late-April, so we’ve got some time to put our heads together and come up with some ideas. But first, here’s what we already have planned:

New garden mural: The current mural sitting outside the garden was created in 2018 by artist, Eric Ricks, and was painted by a variety of community members through a paint-by-the-numbers method. The mural has formed some large cracks and will need to be replaced. SW Gardens President, Pamela, applied for a grant to pay local artist, Shani Shih, to lead another paint-by-number mural creation during our April kick-off. If there are particular themes or images you think the mural should feature, you can share your ideas via this Jamboard.

Learning how to grow mushrooms: The Department of Parks and Recreation, in conjunction with the University of the District of Columbia and Sharondale Farm, are launching a series of workshops on how to grow gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. They have chosen a site in each ward in DC to host a workshop, and our garden was the selected site for Ward 6. The workshops will teach the cultivation of several different types of mushrooms using low-tech, low-cost methods with the goal of training more people to provide this training, and help the DMV area market locally grown mushrooms. Each workshop will be limited to 25 people and is free of charge to the participants. Each participant will receive two logs and will inoculate them during the workshop. If you’re interested in participating, sign up here.

There are a few other things planned but you’ll have to wait until the next newsletter to learn more 😉. If you’d like to help plan activities for the kick-off or throughout the garden year, reach out in the next week, so we can begin planning!