Hello Gardeners and Supporters of The Cullowhee Community Garden! Happy planting to you all! We are excited to announce our new series of Monthly Educational Workshops in The Cullowhee Community Garden! 

We have decided to offer a seasonally relevant beginning gardener series, starting on April 19^th starting at 1:00 pm, during our regular Saturday workday.

Our first offering will be Beginning Gardening 101,waking up the garden! We will cover topics such as: Soil, the foundation of all gardening; Starting Seeds, direct seeding vs transplanting; Annual and Perennial Weed Maintenance—the good, the bad, and the delicious; fertilizing; mulches; and much more. Please bring any questions you may have!

In May we cover Compost making and applications, and we dig deeper into the soil (ahem!). June will introduce gardeners to the ideas of Companion Planting and Succession Planting, both through the season and through the years. We will also cover Beneficial Flowers and Plants, including plants that attract beneficial insects, trap crops, and farm-scaping. In July join us to learn about Insects, both Pests and Beneficials. We will also cover Disease Prevention and treatment options. In August join us to learn about starting your Fall/Winter Garden and using Season Extension techniques such as mini-hoops and row covers. September will be time to learn about saving seeds. And we will wrap it up in October by Putting The Garden To Bed, and Maintaining The Winter Garden

We are continuing our twice-weekly Community Workdays in the Cullowhee Community Garden on Saturdays from 10 am until 2 pm, and on Wednesdays now starting at 4:00 pm and going until dusk. These workdays are a great time to get an introduction to the garden, meet other volunteers and gardeners, and to help with tasks outside of individual garden plots.

We look forward to seeing everyone around the garden this spring. The garden is coming to life, and is very beautiful this time of year. None of this would be possible without all of your hard work and support. Thank You All!

Happy Springtime Everyone!

There may still be cold and snow on our horizon, as well as  in the garden this morning, but the plants and the soil know that it is springtime. And so do we here in The Cullowhee Community Garden!  

Wow, we sure have been busy since that last blog post on this site. Apologies for not keeping you all updated more. We have planted many of our fruit trees in the style of a 

Food Forest along the western edge of the garden area. 

We completed and planted our blueberry mounds along our main pathway. 

We have been removing invasive plant species, we cleaned out the beautiful black willow tree (Salix nigra) next to the shed, 

and have landscaped around it 

and throughout the garden with native shrubs and wildflowers that were donated to us by the plant vendors from the 2013 Cullowhee Native Plants Conference.

We have formed our planning committee, and held the first meeting of the year. The committee is using the consensus-based decision making process. You can read more about that here: www.consensusdecisionmaking.org

Currently our Community Volunteer Workdays are on Wednesdays from 3 pm until dusk, and every Saturday from 10 am until 2 pm. Common tasks include planting, weeding, spreading mulch, helping us with small infrastructure projects, and much more. Also, look for educational programs that we will begin offering in conjunction with the NC Cooperative Extension Service. We will keep you posted on that.

Please share with us suggestions and ideas for educational topics that you would like to see offered in The Cullowhee Community Garden, or if you would like to present on a topic that you know a lot about. You can also suggest other knowledgeable members of our community who you think could offer a great workshop for us.

We would love to have you come visit with us! The garden is always open, and always beautiful! Please, stop on by anytime! Until then, enjoy these videos of the garden.

Kale Yeah!