Civic Garden Center

Today I'm talking with Sam at the Civic Garden Center. You can also follow on Facebook.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Sam at Civic Garden Center. How are you, Sam? I'm good, Mary. How are you doing? I'm great. I'm so curious to find out about your organization and a little bit about you, so tell me about yourself.

00:30
Yeah, the Civic Garden Center is an organization that's been around for a long time. My role at the Civic Garden Center is the conservation program manager. So our organization as a whole, as I said, we've been around for a while. We were founded in 1942 coming out of the big green gardens movement. So we were teaching people how to grow food at home so that they could send more industrial agriculture overseas for the war effort.

00:57
And we've basically been teaching people how to garden ever since. So our mission is building community through gardening, education, and environmental stewardship. And we really focus primarily on working in urban neighborhoods within the greater Cincinnati area. Food access on issues surrounding conservation on youth education. So we have a pretty wide ranging scope of work. And our.

01:27
The primary focus is the education piece. So we really try to make sure that we're spending as much time as possible training people, teaching people how to garden, how to be self-sufficient, so they can then take those practices back to their home garden, back to a public garden or another community space. And so through that work, you know, we really...

01:51
We try our best to encourage people to get outside and get their hands dirty. And we try to be that resource to come back to so they can keep kind of going down their journey of learning how to, you know, vegetable garden, learning how to work with native plants, whatever kind of their passion or interest may be. We try to be their kind of educational resource for folks in the Cincinnati area. And then within...

02:15
Our organization, my role specifically is focused on our conservation program. So for us, our conservation efforts are really focused on invasive species removal and establishing native habitats. So we work both with private landowners and homeowners, as well as public spaces and the Cincinnati Parks Department to try to kind of...

02:44
our conservation efforts. And so I have the fortune of running our native plant population programming on site where we grow about 4,000 native plants a year and a couple hundred native trees on top of that. So we'll work to educate homeowners through classes to grow native plants. We organize a couple of plant festivals throughout the year where people can come and buy plants from us and we provide some education along with that.

03:14
And then finally, I work with folks on doing species removal, primarily in public land. So at the Instant Sandy Parks, we train volunteers on how to do that removal and how to identify plants and how to work with volunteers so they can lead their own kind of neighborhood efforts doing this work. You have a Native Plant Festival coming up, right? We do. We do. We have our Native Plant Festival. It's the first Saturday after Labor Day.

03:44
here in Cincinnati. It's a really, really fun event. It's one that has been, it's only in its second year right now, but it's been growing really quickly in popularity for us. And we grow plants for that festival and then we also invite other local native plant nurseries to come and sell plants and to really try to get the word out both about the importance of native plants and just try to provide space for the community of people to gather and celebrate native plants.

04:15
Yeah, can you tell me about the importance of native plants? Because I know, but my listeners might not. Yeah, of course. I love to love to talk about this topic. So when it comes to native plants, you know, the importance that we really focus on is first and foremost, the ecological importance. You know, the plants are simply the plants that are indigenous to North America. So they're the plants that naturally evolved and adapted.

04:42
for our climates, our soils, all of the conditions that we have here in North America. And through that process, they developed pretty tight-knit relationships with specific organisms, oftentimes insects or other wildlife in the ecosystem. And so I think the simplest way to talk about native plants are, native plants are food and habitat for our local wildlife. So without our native plants...

05:12
Many of the insects, many of the birds that we all love simply wouldn't have the food or the nesting resources or some other crucial piece of habitat that allows them to survive. So native plants play a really important ecological role as the base, the trophic level, that base food source for so many organisms. And without them, many of our organisms here in North America simply wouldn't be able to complete their life cycles.

05:41
And the other thing I'll add about native plants is they also provide some really great functional aspects for humans when it comes to us thinking about our gardens, especially as we're thinking about climate change. Native plants have the ability to really, because they're so well adapted for our climates, withstand a lot of these shifts that we're seeing in our climate. So native plants are really well adapted to different, you know, rain events, maybe longer periods of drought.

06:11
Some of the diseases and insect pests that are common in our areas as those periods where there may be larger populations A lot of our native plants have tools to deal with those a little bit better than a lot of the non-native Ornamental plants that people often end up buying at the big box stores or other nurseries Yes, exactly. Um, the other thing about native plants is that they are beneficial to humans in that they are

06:40
Some of them are edible and some of them are medicinal for humans too. So native plants are great. I'm a big fan. Absolutely. The medicinal and edible piece is something I think we really cannot ignore. I think oftentimes when people think about food sources in the landscape, you know, they think about their tomatoes or their cucumbers, or some of these vegetables that, you know, were kind of introduced to North America, but there's so many food sources when it comes to.

07:08
Our native plants, our indigenous cultures here in North America showed us that they can fully survive on the plants that are already here. And there are so many medicinal and edible uses for native plants. So you can start to integrate those into your yard, not only to attract the interesting birds but to give yourself some food or some medicine right in your own backyard. Yes, that's my favorite part. We have wild black raspberries that grow on our tree line.

07:37
They are a bi-yearly. Once every two years, they produce really nice berries. And so when we moved here and discovered we have black raspberries in our tree lime, we were very excited. And they are native plants. So that's just an example of a native plant. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. It can just be a raspberry. Absolutely, yeah. I love being able to go on a hike and just snack as you go. If you stumble across some.

08:04
black raspberries or something along those lines. I know here in Southwest Ohio, our pawpaws are starting to ripen. It's an awesome native fruit and one that I really enjoy this time of year. It has a lot of good nutrition benefits for people. And you can simply walk out to the woods or walk out to your garden where you might have a pawpaw tree this time of year and just pick them up off the ground and have a snack right there.

08:31
Yep, an important safety tip. If you don't know what you're looking at, don't eat it. Make sure you can identify the thing as safe to eat before you eat it. Absolutely. And we also always encourage people that when they are going out and doing something like foraging, that you're really conscientious of what you're taking, especially if you're taking from a public space. Some public spaces don't allow foraging, and we want to be respectful of that. Some public spaces...

09:00
Maybe you need a permit because there are so many people out there in the world. You know, we want to also make sure that we are leaving food for wildlife and for other organisms. So you definitely want to be conscientious when you're out foraging and snacking on some of these native fruits that we don't take the entire population. We want to make sure we're leaving, you know, seeds behind and other resources for other wildlife. Yes. You know how they say moderation in all things? Consideration in all things as well.

09:29
Absolutely. Yep. All right. Well, that's all amazing information. And I stumbled on you guys on Facebook. So how many people do you think benefit from what you're doing? I mean, do you have numbers of people who take your classes? Like, can you quantify? That's a hard question. Yeah, we I would say it's a very large, it's a large number of people. I mean, we have

09:59
hundreds of people who are coming to take our classes kind of throughout the year. We generally have different classes through the seasons depending on kind of what's available growing season-wise. So throughout the winter and into the spring is really heavy on vegetable gardening and focusing on growing food at home. You know, we do a few native plant classes that time of year, but usually those pick up as we get a little more into the growing season.

10:29
We do a lot of classes for people that might be kind of related to food or self-sufficiency. So like recently we did a mushroom growing class. I know we've done backyard chicken classes. And it's always interesting because within the different buckets of education, we have kind of different people with passions. And so we attract a lot of different people, you know, to the different classes. Some of them are absolutely dead set on.

10:58
coming to every vegetable garden class that we offer. Some of them may come to a bunch of different classes throughout the year. And the other thing that we do is that we kind of act as a community resource. So we have different community gardens here in Cincinnati who can come to us and ask for volunteer help or ask for help sourcing seeds or plants for their garden. Maybe they need help kind of working through some sort of ordinance from the city that they got.

11:28
Anything like that we try to work with our community. So throughout the year it's really hard for us to keep track of all the touch points we have with people. But that's our kind of approach is this open door policy where anyone can come and ask us some questions or come and get some advice. And we try to make sure that we're as supportive as possible. And if we don't know the answer, we'll happily connect you with another great organization or person that we know locally who might. That's amazing.

11:57
the services you guys are providing are invaluable. I don't know that we have anything like what you're doing here in the way that you're doing it, but Minnesota has extension services through the University of Minnesota, and they handle a lot of what you're talking about. Does the Ohio University have extension services? Yeah, yes, Ohio has their extension office through

12:24
through Ohio State and so they do have a local branch and they provide a lot of really valuable resources. Oftentimes we find that they're just limited resource-wise so that they, while they provide tons of resources, a lot of good information for our region, they oftentimes aren't able to provide the same kinds of hands-on kind of engagement that we can provide. And so...

12:53
Throughout the year, we oftentimes work closely with the Extension Office and some of the resources that we're providing. We'll use their resources in our education. So we do have those resources here. Fortunately, we do also have other organizations that can provide some more hands-on assistance or maybe can get people out in the field a little more easily than our Extension agents can because they're just pulled in so many different directions.

13:22
Oftentimes they're a little bit limited in how much time, especially one-on-one, they can spend with a community member or somebody here in urban Cincinnati. Awesome. So I have a crazy question. I'm not a mom to small children anymore, but I was at one point in time. And one of the things that would keep me from going to things is that I couldn't bring the kids if they were under, I don't know, 10 years old.

13:51
babies with them when they when they come to a class or is that not okay? Yeah, we try to be as family friendly as possible. You know, we if we are doing something more workshop style where it's a little bit more hands on, you know, we'll let people know ahead of time but we are really try to encourage people to bring their families to make it as accessible as possible. I know that especially nowadays with how insane child care costs are.

14:18
A lot of times people are pretty limited and so we do encourage people to bring their kids. You know, we do have a couple of programs specifically for the kids here on site as well throughout the year. We do a lot of work with Cincinnati Public Schools and trying to educate different youth and different age groups. But here on site, you know, we do have a couple of programs for homeschoolers or, you know, if people do want to bring their kids to a class. We happily encourage that.

14:48
definitely for us all about the community and if you know there's barriers for people to come that involves you know bringing their kids, we don't want that to stop someone from coming to a class or an event. Yes, and the sooner you get little ones hooked on growing plants, they're going to do it for the rest of their lives because it's really fun. Oh my gosh, yeah. Little kids when they get out in the garden and you get them hunting for pollinators or digging through the compost and finding worms.

15:17
their faces light up in a way that, you know, adults just don't have that kind of, you know, euphoria with those kinds of activities anymore. And so the little kids are definitely some of the most fun to work with. And I think some of the most inspiring for sure. Yeah, they see everything so differently. It's a different lens because it's completely new to them. They're not jaded yet.

15:43
Yeah, I think it's always a fun perspective to have the little kids out in the garden and see what they're noticing. They oftentimes do pick up on things that you wouldn't expect or maybe they ask you a question that seems really simple, but you're like, oh, people don't generally ask me, you know, why a flower is this color or something along those lines. And so it is always, always interesting and more thought provoking than you might think working with the little ones.

16:08
Yeah, having raised four kids, they will ask you things that you never thought they would ask you. It's very funny. I can remember the kids being in the back seat of the car when we would go places and invariably one of them would pop up with something and I would have to really think as to whether I knew the answer. And if I didn't know the answer, I was very honest with them and I was like, I don't know guys we're going to have to look it up. Yeah.

16:34
often get stumped by our little ones in the garden as well when we do have those interactions. Yeah. So on the opposite end of the spectrum, how old is the oldest person that has come to your stuff? We do have a lot of folks who are retired who come and volunteer with us. So I'm talking to you on a Wednesday morning and we actually have...

17:02
Wednesday morning volunteer, they call themselves the dirt crew. And they've been many of them volunteering here for 10, 20, even 30 years. Um, and that group is, uh, mostly retired individuals who come and just spend the morning working in the garden. You know, they'll hang out and have lunch afterwards, or sometimes they'll plan a tour of a nearby garden. Um, so it was really great sense of community here. And I think the.

17:28
especially as folks are getting a little bit older, they have that chance to connect with some of their, a little more time and connect with the resources they have here locally and can get out in the garden. I know we also historically have worked oftentimes with garden clubs and sometimes some of those groups can be a bit older, but it may just depend on the group. And so, it really ranges. I'd say we work with all age levels for sure.

17:57
And, you know, we try our best to attract those young homeowners or some of those younger individuals, you know, just for them depends on how much time they have. But I do think coming out of the pandemic and, you know, people really being focused on where their food's coming from or trying to figure out how to better grow their own food or plant some native plants, you know, we've seen some really great interest in the classes.

18:25
So you said Cincinnati, Ohio, right? Yes, correct. Yeah, and Cincinnati is a big city, yes? Yes, we're a pretty good sized city. It's actually within the metropolitan area. As you go up to Dayton, there's quite a few people around. Okay, so I'm assuming that Cincinnati has food desert areas, just like every other big city. Yes. So I'm...

18:53
I'm trying to get to do you guys, I don't know, help support the local food shelves or stuff like that too, besides just having community gardens? Yeah, we do. You know, within our programming, we do have a physical garden space. A lot of our work happens out in the community, but we do work. We do have an eight acre park that we co-manage with, San Sandy Parks.

19:22
That is our home base and our place to create demonstration gardens, have field trips, things like that. And one of the demonstration gardens we have here on site is a vegetable garden, which is managed by volunteers. And that garden explicitly does support, you know, all the food from that garden goes to local food pantries. So I think last year they were in the 800 to 1,000 pounds of produce that they produced in that garden.

19:52
throughout the year. And then within the kind of broader Cincinnati community, we definitely are a city that struggles with food deserts. And like many other cities of our size, as we're trying to figure out what those answers are, it's not always straightforward. And so we do provide whatever education and resources we can to some of those income, lower income communities where food access might be an issue.

20:19
And a lot of what we do is again, working kind of through our community garden model. And while traditionally community gardens entail somebody having a personal plot where they grow food for themselves. They do have, you know, we do have community gardens that have different approaches. So some gardens are pantry gardens. Some gardens maybe are growing and kind of doing their own.

20:46
food giveaway within the neighborhood, or it's a come and pick what you want as you want kind of model. So really within the neighborhood, it's up to the community and up to those who are organizing the garden to figure out how they want their garden to function. And then we do our best to help them understand what that would take. So we have a comprehensive training program that is our community garden development training, the 12 week program where somebody can come and learn.

21:15
not only what it takes to grow a vegetable from start to finish throughout a season, but understand how to engage their community, how to grapple with some of those questions like food security within the neighborhood, how do you find resources and grant funding and volunteer support for the garden. So it's really comprehensive and we do our best to try to provide those resources within those different neighborhoods. And so.

21:43
As people come to us with ideas, we will definitely go out of our way to support in places where food access is especially an issue. That's amazing. Okay. The reason I asked about the food pantries or food shelves is not even 20 years ago, a lot of the food shelves did not necessarily have fresh produce to give away. And if they did, it wasn't very good quality.

22:11
And I think as people have become more aware that produce is really important for your body, it's really important to eat good fresh produce, other places have become aware, like us here, we grow a farm to market garden and we donate food to the local food shelf because people need produce, they need that. It's part of what makes them go.

22:40
you know, makes them functional human beings. And so I'm always excited when I hear that an organization like yours or a local grower or whoever is supplying good nutritional local food to the food shelves and the food pantries because just because you're not rich doesn't mean you can't eat well. Yeah, it's something that I think is increasingly part of that conversation, but I agree, I think it's something that still

23:09
gets oftentimes overlooked. It's definitely not a simple thing, as we're trying to include this food access, building a community garden and trying to really support a community in a way that helps really grapple with that issue of food access is not simple. That takes a pretty big scale and a lot of work. So, oftentimes we don't think of community gardens as being the solution to a food desert.

23:39
Unfortunately, just not that simple. But I think kind of what you're touching on is this idea of how can we educate more people, how can we help people provide access to some of that fresh local food. And that's where I think the community garden model really does help bridge that gap. It does provide a space right in the neighborhood where kids can come and see.

24:03
where some of the produce on the shelves comes from, make sure that they understand that carrots come from the ground or that tomatoes come off of the plants. Just making those connections is really kind of step one. And then from there, you know, we can start to build in some education around, you know, what, how do we integrate these foods into our kind of habits in the kitchen. We do classes throughout the summer in different community gardens. So we'll go to

24:32
gardens and we want to make sure that we're doing, you know, the actions kind of in the physical garden space that we're not just in a classroom talking about these things. And one of the things that our urban agriculture coordinator, Kimesha, has done through that program is also include cooking classes. So she will put together recipes and share those recipes and they will harvest things from the garden and that night cook them up right there in the garden and make sure that

25:02
some of these veggies that maybe people didn't grow up eating, things like an eggplant that can be a little bit finicky, maybe if you're starting out with it, to figure out what to do with it in the kitchen, that people understand how to use it, how to grow it, how they can benefit from a health perspective from those different foods. So we try to be holistic in how we approach it, but I do think having the gardens in the neighborhood and having a place for somebody to try a fresh tomato,

25:31
really does change their whole perspective on the benefits of some of those fresh local vegetables. Definitely. Your organization sounds like a very, very big umbrella with a bunch of stuff underneath it. How do you guys keep this organized? Because you can't be a one-man show. You must have a bunch of people. Yeah. We are absolutely an organization with a...

26:00
Big umbrella, as you said, you know, we generally have one, maybe two staff people dedicated to a lot of our kind of program focus areas. We're only a staff of 10 people, so we try to cover as much ground as we can. And for us, it really does rely on two things. One is volunteers. We simply could not do a fraction of the work that we do without volunteers. We have volunteers who are here every single week who are...

26:29
really dedicated to the mission who are helping us figure out just how to operate on a day-to-day basis. And then we have volunteers who are joining us on a one-off basis or maybe a couple times a year. And so the volunteers are absolutely crucial and definitely make our big projects much more feasible. Things like our upcoming Native Plant Festival simply would not happen without them. And then the other piece for us to make sure that our reach is kind of as broad.

26:58
as it can be, is to really focus on the education. We are not an organization that owns lots of land. We do not go and manage a lot of different properties. We really try to make sure that we are the place to come and learn how to do it and then send people out to do it in their neighborhood. We don't have the capacity to oversee a lot of different projects at once. You know, there's...

27:24
handful of community gardens and a couple of conservation projects where we are overseeing the work on a monthly basis. But generally we try to make sure that we are just an educator and not a land manager. So you're planting the ideas and encouraging the ideas and supporting the ideas with the people outside of you do the actual gardening work.

27:50
Yeah, oftentimes, I mean, we, I will say our staff is still out there getting our hands dirty on a very regular basis. You know, we do have a full-time horticulturist that's working here on the grounds, but our general model is to teach people the way. Maybe we have a couple of spaces that we are more involved in where we use them as kind of demonstration spaces. But we are absolutely trying to inspire others to start their own projects.

28:19
and trying to really hopefully provide the training and knowledge for somebody to organize and lead a project on their own in their community. That's great. So if anyone in your area of Ohio wants more information or wants to help, wants to volunteer, what's your website and can they find that information there? Yeah. The website is civi

28:48
And we are, as I said, located here in Cincinnati. We're in a very urban part of Cincinnati. We're in the neighborhood of Avondale. So around the edge of UC, the University of Cincinnati's campus and Cincinnati Children's Hospital is very close to us. So we're in a very urban corridor and we do have business hours during the week so people can simply stop in and learn how to get involved or see our grounds and see what's going on.

29:17
Starting with the website I think is a really good first touch point. And then from there, we don't have a really kind of onboarding or formal onboarding system for volunteers or anything like that. We really have a model of sign up for a class or sign up for a volunteer event. So up and from there, our staff is usually pretty happy to talk your ear off about all the different opportunities and all the different projects we have going on and how you might get involved.

29:45
Okay, and tell me again when the Native Plant Festival is, just so if anybody missed it at the beginning. Yeah, the Native Plant Festival is on September 7th, and it's going to be from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. And as I mentioned, it's going to have plants that we grew from seed here, a bunch of other local native plant nurseries, educational talks, music, food trucks, and so they're trying to make it so people can come and learn a little bit.

30:14
buy some plants and get a beautiful day in the garden. And have some fun, yeah. All right, Sam, I try to keep these to half an hour and we're there, so thank you so much for your time today, I appreciate it. Thank you, this was great. All right, have a great rest of your day. You too. Bye.