On a late day in August, Ventura County UCCE Master Gardeners and 20 hard- working youth in the Oxnard City Corps program began installation of a rain garden at the Camarillo Ranch House. Channels were dug, and rocks and boulders moved. An estimated 100 wheelbarrows of dirt was moved on one of the hottest days of the year all by volunteers to create the rain garden.

So what you may ask is a rain garden? Ventura County UCCE’s Monique Myers provides the following answer:

Rain gardens collect rain water and beautify a yard. They provide a simple form of rain water harvesting, allowing homeowners to save valuable rain water. Although more commonly found in wetter climates, rain gardens are certainly beneficial in water-thirsty California where local rainfall often does not meet water demand and imported water is necessary to support the majority of the population. As water prices climb and the threat of droughts loom-large homeowners and municipalities are looking toward conserving and utilizing water that falls on-site. Rain gardens offer a simple, attractive and inexpensive option.

Basically, rain gardens receive rain that falls on a roof or other collection surface.  The water is channeled, via rain gutters, pipes, swails or curb openings, into a depression in the yard where it soaks into the ground and waters vegetation. Contrary to what many people think, a rain garden is not a pond feature. A properly functioning rain garden holds water for only a short period of time. The purpose is to retain water just long enough for it to percolate into the soil. Most of the time, the bed of the rain garden is dry.

More work days will be scheduled soon, including one on Monday October the 5th. This will be a planting day. Work will start at about 9:00 am near the barn. Bring gloves, hat, shovel and smile! If you are unable to make that day, but are interested in helping, please contact our office.

Oxnard City Corps youth working on rain garden project

Oxnard City Corps youth working on rain garden project

This week Ventura County UCCE’s director, Rose Hayden-Smith travels to Washington DC! Rose is a W.K. Kellogg/IATP Food & Society Fellow and is in Washington this week to attend meetings on National Food and Ag Policy. She will be sharing with us on this important topic throughout the week.

(Please note: This post in a special bonus. Another article was posted earlier today.)

I have not posted since July on my Victory Grower blog.  It’s been – at times - a difficult and disheartening summer.  Like many Californians, I will remember this period as the “summer of our discontent” here, a period when we struggled with the realities of limitations.   Limitations imposed by a crushing state budget deficit, a dysfunctional system of state governance, double digit unemployment, furloughs, and a lack of water to support California agriculture and residents.  It’s been a surreal period when we’ve seen further erosion in public funding to things Californians have taken as a birthright, including one of the best systems of higher education in the world.  It’s been a summer of strange weather, of wildfires, a period when the Golden State has seemed dusty, limp, directionless.  Even some of the most optimistic people I know (myself included) have seemed tired, a bit jaded, and wondering where we will go from here.  The budget die are cast: the game will be played out with new rules, new expectations, new outcomes.

For me, the shoot of green poking through a parched landscape of uncertainty has been the amazing degree of interest in gardening.  My phone is ringing off the hook, and my email inbox has been jammed with requests for support for home and community garden efforts.  The UC Master Gardener helpline is reporting a high volume of calls from home gardeners and others seeking support for gardening projects.  As Californians face hard times, they are responding creatively and innovatively.

What is remarkable to me is the nature of these gardening projects requesting support and assistance from UC.  It has ranged from homeowners determined to rip out lawns and put in edible landscape to major public agencies.   From a young graduate student sitting in my office seeking ideas on how to garden with schoolchildren in Ecuador (you'll be great, Megan!) to hearing Mayor Weir of Ventura share her vision for a gardening community.  It has been a top-down and bottom-up movement, simultaneously.   The world as Californians know it may be falling apart and changing, but many believe these gardening and civic agriculture projects will redeem the situation, will improve our communities, our world, our lives.

Here’s a short list of recent activity.  The County Public Health Department requested a meeting to discuss a collaborative project with UCCE in Ventura County.  This public agency views gardening as a tool, a vital component even, in chronic disease prevention, the fight against obesity, improving nutrition and other Public Health efforts. Could our Master Gardeners develop and deliver a gardening training for those engaged in community outreach?  The county’s food bank, Food Share has also met with us.  Food Share has started a Garden Share program, encouraging home gardeners to share excess produce with the county’s hungry, now estimated at 1 in 6 residents (this in one of the more affluent counties in California).  Food Share is also encouraging backyard gleaning projects, and is working with the County Agency on Aging to promote a garden to supplement senior nutrition efforts; we’ve been asked to provide support there, as well.

A new community garden has started in Camarillo; this effort was led by citizens, one a Master Gardener.  The Community Roots Garden, based at the North Oxnard  United Methodist Church in – a full acre – is bringing farm workers into community with volunteers who are supporting the effort.  Everyone is learning together.  Another agency has recently contacted us to see about revitalizing an abandoned orchard to use it as a source of food for the hungry.   A local group of volunteers, the Grow Food Party Crew, has provided free labor and expertise to plant numerous home gardens, home gardens that demonstrate organic gardening practices.  The Ventura City Corps youth group, some trained by UC staff and Master Gardeners, has put a garden in the front of their building, where it can be easily viewed from City Hall.  And at Ventura City Hall last Friday, the day before Labor Day weekend, about fifty people gathered and took the first steps to create a Ventura City chapter of a A LEAN VC.  This will create a broad-based community coalition to support health and wellness in the city of Ventura, and one of the four pillars of activity will center on local food systems and gardening. To cap off last week, a terrific article in the Star, written by Lisa McKinnon talked about the growing CSA movement in the county.

Ventura is just one county in California, which is just one state in the Union. There are thousands of these efforts occurring across the United States, as a passion for gardening grips the nation.   Much of this interest can be attributed to the White House vegetable garden planted by First Lady Michelle Obama, and the USDA’s People Garden, sited on the National Mall.

I’ve been invited to visit both of those gardens this week, and will be blogging daily from Washington, DC.  (I’ve even brought plastic bags, hoping to snag some compost from the First Pile and also some of the compost at the USDA’s People’s Garden, which came from Rodale Farm in Pennsylvania, which has been so center in the modern sustainable farming and organic movement).

Whatever the problems facing residents of Ventura, Portland, Peoria, Lansing, or even Washington, DC, gardening certainly provides part of the solution.

More tomorrow.  On Tuesday, I’ll be attending the National Food Policy Council Conference and also visiting the Congressional Hunger Center.  There, I’ll have a chance to learn more about hunger and food policy in America from leading advocates, including one of my personal heroes, Ed Cooney, whom I met on a previous trip to Washington.  Ed is an expert on food stamp and nutrition policy, and these are policies that have more impact on our children and communities than you can imagine.  (BTW, Congress is currently discussing the Childhood Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004.  This act encompasses all of the federal child nutrition programs, including the School Breakfast and the National School Lunch Programs, the Summer Food Service Program, the Child and Adult Care Food Program and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.  This is American food and public policy, writ at its largest).

We’ll undoubtedly be talking some about how community gardening and urban agriculture efforts can help address food security issues, childhood nutrition and poverty.

See you tomorrow.

 

The following Featured Club Happenings was submitted by Piru 4-H Club President, Kris Dewey.

It has been a busy year for Piru 4H! Our members have been provided many educational opportunities because we have a fabulous group of project leaders.

• Our geology project has visited the Santa Paula Oil Museum.
  

• The Cultural Appreciation project attended a Renaissance Fair.
  

• Our swine group is as big as ever and toured a local butcher shop.

• We have two members in the beef group taking animals to the fair in August.
  

• The teatime participants have been learning proper etiquette and took turns hosting tea parties.
  

• Several scrapbooking members took field trips to scrapbooking shops and had a great time learning how to showcase their favorite photos.
  

• We had a cake decorating group that made wonderful snacks for our general meetings.
  

• Our fishing group went on camping field trips and had a great time learning how to bait and cast hooks.
  

• The community service project members participated in TOTSOCE (Trick or Treat So Others Can Eat), made Christmas Baskets and Valentines for U.S. military veterans, and most recently helped sort clothes and other donations and serve lunch at a homeless shelter in Ventura.
  

• We offered the members and their parents the opportunity to attend a CPR class.
  

We are planning a year-in-review to celebrate the successes of this year after the Ventura County Fair and wish all of you a great 2010 season!

Featured Club Happenings are a regular feature in Clover Lines, our 4-H newsletter. Back issues of Clover Lines can be found on our website.

 

The Pollinator Partnership, which includes the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign, the National Gardening Association and the USDA has put together a great online curriculum titled Nature’s Partners: Pollinators, Plants, and You. The curriculum can be found at http://www.pollinator.org/curriculum/index.php.

The education materials are designed for children in grades 3-6; however, I imagine most of us can learn a great deal from the website. The background information contained in each module is written for educators. Adults interested in learning about pollinators themselves will find a wealth of knowledge for the taking!

In addition to the great educational information, the site has fabulous photos, instructions for a wide variety of activities, ideas for community service projects, links for further information, and much more.