Hello Gardeners New and Old!
We’re super excited to be kicking off this year’s garden season soon. We’ll be having an All Gardener’s Meeting on March 21st, 10am (location TBD) to discuss key dates, opportunities, and most importantly get to meet each other! Please do your best to make it, if possible. In the meantime I wanted to share some important information for early on in the season:
You can find your assigned garden bed here. One notable change is that the current shared community beds will be changed to assigned beds, and we’ll be building a large shared community bed near the main entrance of the garden.
We’ll be gearing up our education programming for 2026 shortly. Art Perkins and Carol Shilling will now be taking over on leading this effort, with Cindy Pomorski, Rosemary Felhner, and Bryan Mathie supporting. We’re running a little behind on this with all the leadership changes so in the meantime here is last year’s seed starting presentation to get you going.
If you haven’t done so already, just a reminder that it is recommended to make a $20 donation to the garden (or however much you can afford). These donations help us maintain and improve the garden.
Something we want to emphasize this year is that it is expected that all gardeners volunteer to help out on at least one project, event, program, or administrative tasks this year. The community garden is a 100% volunteer organization, and without volunteers there would be no garden. In recent years too much has been falling on a select few. Beyond volunteering for these, consider becoming an activity lead under the garden committee.
- This year we have an ambitious list of projects that we’ll be looking for folks to lead and volunteer for. These projects include rebuilding deteriorating garden beds, dedicated high pressure water lines to reduce the amount of hoses needed and water waste, making new garden bed number signs, safety and accessibility improvements, signage improvements, and a blacktop mural. If you have projects you would like to lead / help out with, or have ideas for new projects don’t hesitate to reach out to the committee. The full list of projects can be found here.
- If projects aren’t your thing, we also will have a number of events to help out with or lead. These include our annual garden cleanups, Easter Egg Hunt, and Friends to Garden Dinner. We’ll also be hosting a Deutschtown Pride event and possibly some other new events this year. Stay tuned!
- We don’t have a ton of programs at present outside of our soil testing program. However, if you have ideas of something you would like to suggest or have something you’d like to implement as part of the garden, bring it up! For example it would be great to implement a free produce share program with the community.
As you hopefully have seen, we’ll be leveraging google groups for email lists this year. These should help our leads more easily communicate and avoid issues with email limits. You’ll also have more control over how you receive emails from these groups and have the ability to unsubscribe at a later time if you like (hopefully not!). Additionally, this will help us maintain access to certain gardening files without making them fully public as well as help keep your contact information private. Lastly, the various leadership teams have group emails that you can message (also on the website):
Speaking of leads, we have a new lineup for this year’s garden committee. Please familiarize yourself with the roles matrix. If you have interest in helping out or taking ownership of any of the activities don’t hesitate to reach out, even if there are already names listed. For the ones that don’t have anyone listed, we could definitely use some extra volunteers.
- Of particular note Dennis Ginther will be stepping away from being the Chair to focus on just enjoying being a gardener. Dennis will continue to serve in an advisory role as well as be active in projects and events. Please join me in thanking Dennis for building such an amazing community and garden, and all that he has contributed to our success! Nat Wetzel will be stepping in as Chair with some big shoes to fill and Dennis Farren will be taking over as Gardening Coordinator.
- Similarly, Sarah Bailey is also stepping away from the Special Event Coordinator role to focus on her role on the EACC board. Please thank her for all the amazing events that she has put together over the years. Melissa Kus will be taking over this role and is already hitting the ground running!
- Lastly Mary Yepez will be stepping up to be our PR Coordinator.
We’ll be kicking off our Thursday community night potlucks on April 30th, with Jen Saffron’s Spezzaturra catering the dinner. Hope to see you there! If you’re interested in signing up for a future potluck main dish, reach out to the events-and-activities group or Jenn Paliani directly, or fill in an empty row on our community night spreadsheet. Until then we try to meet up at a local restaurant or pub. Follow along where we’ll be attending on the same sheet. Hope to see you out!
Phwew! That’s a lot of information. Thanks for sticking with it! Again, all of the references can be found on the website in the future. Looking forward to getting the 2026 growing season started and meeting all of the new faces.
See you soon,
– Nat