Even though there are no more boxes to rent for the season, please feel free to come visit us, volunteer and participate in our events. We usually have a couple of “dropouts” and sometimes have vacant boxes available in the New Year. Check back with us.
Author: corspringsgarden
Garden Box Build
Coral Springs Rotarians, high schoolers and other volunteers joined our gardeners in building twenty new garden boxes to replace the original twenty. We made connections over the hard, heavy work in the heat and mud! We are thankful to all the hands that helped get it done. We are fortunate to have such a supportive community!
Photos by Cheryl Harker Devlin
.
Fall 2015 Season is here: There are a few garden boxes left.
We are rapidly approaching the end of summer, at least as far as renewing and signing up for garden contracts is concerned. Some of our more avid gardeners have been harvesting summer crops like sweet potatoes and okra.
Time to plant Fall annuals. It is the season where we become much more active!
Many gardeners are renewing, some are not. There are several people who have moved away, whether within the state or out of it, and we will miss them! We have new gardeners signing up at a brisk place. We still have a few boxes left, but they will be going quickly! Please download the Garden Box Agreement from its page on this site, and review it.
We have two different signup events over the course of the next several weeks:
Sunday, September 13, 10 am to 2 pm
Saturday, September 19, 8 to 10 am.
Also, we are in the garden during the week, and on Sundays and are happy to meet up with interested potential gardeners then.
Call us at 754-200-1788 or email us at cscomgarden@gmail.com with your interest and info.
Stay tuned for gardening education and work/social events
Installing our First Food Forest Patch!
Food Forest Garden Blitz
Rotary Coral Springs Community Garden,
2575 Sportsplex Drive, across from Athletic fields
Saturday, May 16, 2015
8:30 am until 12 noon.
Creating beds of mulch and compost,
Planting fruit trees and shrubs
Potluck lunch
Brief talk on Edible Forest gardening
Bring some food to share, your own utensils and container to reduce waste, if possible, closed shoes, hat, sunscreen, gloves. There will be water.
Contact: 754-200-1788; cscomgarden@gmail.com
EarthFest 2015
This year the city’s EarthFest is across the street at our neighbors, the Sawgrass Nature Center, this Saturday, April 18, from 9-1. It is the first time EarthFest is being held there, and the first time that our community garden is specifically mentioned as part of EarthFest. We’ve come a long way in developing relationships with wonderful people and organizations in the city!
We will have a booth at the Nature Center, and we will take people on tours of our community garden from 10-11 am. There will be a certain number of native milkweed plants, and herbs for people to take home.
Rotary Community Garden Food Forest is coming! Sign up for the Design Workshop January 24-25, 2015
We are very excited to announce our upcoming Food Forest Design Workshop, Saturday and Sunday, January 24 and 25, 2015, 9 am to 5 pm, on the Sportsplex campus, where our garden is. A food forest is a layered mini ecosystem, designed to behave like a forest, including plant diversity, which produces food – from fruit on trees to leaves on ground level plants – for the human and nonhuman community around it.
We will have the privilege to be learning from designer Erica Klopf, who brings a high level of knowledge, experience and teaching excellence to us. Erica designed the Florida Gulf Coast University Food Forest (http://fgcufoodforest.weebly.com). She writes:
“Come ye plant nerds, tropical fruit enthusiasts, and permaculture designers for a weekend of in-depth analysis and design collaboration that will result in a landmark food forest in Coral Springs.
Join us as we explore historical examples of food forests and learn about strategies for their design, including microclimate design, sun catches, spacing, ADA compliance, windbreaks, and guild design. Join us in a discussion on the phases of ecological succession in natural ecosystems. How does our disturbance regime affect the succession of our food forests and how do we design our phasing based on human disturbance over time?
Get your plant geek on with in-depth discussion on species for the subtropics including pioneer trees, nitrogen fixers, dynamic accumulators, natives, host plants, perennial vegetables, fruit trees, and windbreaks. Then, join in the application of material covered to create design drafts for the Rotary Community Garden Food Forest.”
The in-class portions will be at the meeting room at the Tennis Center, where we will gather to begin the course on Saturday morning. Site analysis and design development portions will be at the future food forest site, beside the west fence of the community garden, about a quarter of a mile north of the Tennis Center, on the same (East) side of the street, by the Dog Park.
Call Judi Gulko at the phone number on the flyer for further information, including registration
Garden Boxes Full and Veggies are Happily Growing
It has been an amazing Fall season. Hard to believe we are almost near the end of the year 2014, and that another season came upon us so quickly…. our busiest one yet! All our garden boxes are rented out and there is a waiting list again. We have very enthusiastic gardeners, a number of whom are actively taking care of the garden as a whole in addition to their own boxes. We are overwhelmed by the community’s response to the garden!
Enjoy some photos of our beginning bounty, compliments of one of our gardner’s family members – photographer Dawin Welch.
The Gardeners are at it again!
On a scorching August day, the Coral Springs Community Garden saw its best players come out and prep the area for another fruitful season. Everyone was amazed at the amount of growth we encountered—the hot rainy summers in Florida are like that! A lot of the plots were choked with weeds, and we needed Lee to scorch the overrun gravel path; that’s the cool way we keep things out here looking so good!
There was a lot to tackle last Sunday. The world’s tallest okra plant was surrounded by out of control Morning Glory that saw a lot of us poking through it with a pitch fork, hoping to find some sweet potatoes. Were any recovered?
We got busy weeding, but we also had time to take to the shade and enjoy some of the provisions. Jackie Ida brought fresh fruit and tons of ice cold water. Jen Russon brought blueberry cake and a carafe of strong iced coffee—others brought donuts and homemade snacks wrapped in foil. Word to the wise: foil is the way to go out in the elements; it’ll save your food from ants!
Download the 2014/2015 Plot Agreement!
But let’s get to the heart of this blog: which serves to remind that the gardening season here in the tropics unofficially starts NOW and resumes full swing in October. We usually don’t put our crops to bed until May. The 2014/2015 Plot Agreement is now available online, so go ahead and fill it out, whether you’re renewing or simply “new”! Judith Gulko, one of the garden organizers, says that technically the garden is full but you never know who’s renewing and who’s not, so do send in your forms and small annual fee for the year!
You’ll notice in this photograph that Judy is wearing a Garden Club shirt—these are for sale! Proceeds go to making this place bigger and better, so be sure to check out all the wares: shirts, cups and totes were all designed by Margarita Lartitegui-Mata, pictured below with her creations. She says the price of these items has yet to be determined, and to please get in touch with her directly if you are interested!
And speaking of work, everyone in the garden is looking forward to meeting some pretty big goals—like turning the adjacent field into a food forest for the public to enjoy. One of our gardeners—you can see her by liking her page on Facebook, is hoping to turn one of the huge plots into Cub Scout Pack 497’s vegetable garden, the fruits of which will all be donated. The cubs are looking forward to meeting the experienced gardeners and getting an earful on how to do their plot up right.
Good things are growing here this year—so come out, roll up your sleeves and start bringing in the harvest. Cheers!
Fall Season 2014
We know some of you are out of town…. and some of us have recently returned….. ah, summer….. Our focus turns to garden planning and seed ordering… and garden ordering… come join us this Sunday, August 24, 8:30-am/as early as humanly possible until before noon. We have shade, we will have seeds, cold water, snacks. Bring seeds, seedlings, snacks, ideas, questions about gardening, ideas about the community garden, desire to get involved with supporting our collective effort….
Confessions of a Lapsed Community Gardener
By Jen Russon
It used to be you’d come here and see mere sections that showed dedication and know-how—now the whole area, which is sizeable, looks well loved. Right now, Monarch butterflies are laying their eggs in the landscaping that butts up against the garden gates, a project I remember helping with. The smell of chamomile, roses and lemongrass mingle with the hot March breeze—intoxicating enough to make you forget there’s a dog park around the corner.
There are personal touches everywhere from small to grand, from clever birdfeeders made of plastic soda bottles to a wide and curving gravel path, paved by the Boy Scouts of America. The abridged version of all this poetic jibber-jabber is that this community garden is something just about everyone, upon entering, wants to be a part of.
What a long way this place had come! Circa 2011, most of the plots were a tangle of dirt and roots—maybe a sweet potato or two if you were lucky. The sign posted on the chain link fence advertised: “Garden Plots Available!”, and for around $39 per year I secured plot #8—I harvested a few handfuls of green beans, lots of lettuce, green onions and a few tomatoes, but certainly, I could do better. I could be inspired by what’s here now: shiny black, low hanging eggplants, big as a size 10 pair of Crocs, jicama, bright green chili peppers, enough kale for everyone standing on line at the Jamba Juice to have an energy drink; cabbage roses, REAL roses—and maybe it would look good enough to put my own personal stamp on it. Pictured here, are some of the more personalized plots, maintained by people who obviously know what they are doing.
While I toured and snapped photos, Satya—a seriously committed member who has been known to lead yoga classes on garden grounds—watered her plots and offered me a crisp green bean.
She gave me the scoop on all the old (and new) faces around here, and mentioned that Lee ought to harvest his beans soon, and get them over to the food charity that the garden has donated hundreds of pounds of fresh produce to over the years.
Anyway, as I thought about all that good will, snapped my photos, and shadows of butterfly wings hovered around my silhouette, I’ll admit to feeling heavy hearted and sheepish, not renewing my plot for 2013/2014. In 2012 I’d paid the annual dues, but handed over my plot to the care of Satya. She’d done an excellent job—but we both knew it was a slippery slope to my not renewing. I had reasoned that it’s too far to drive and my green thumb too non-existent. In truth the garden is around 5 miles away, and I’m as good as any gardener when I try. This sudden shift in my confidence level was something that I at first blamed on sun exposure (unseasonably warm that day in the garden!), but now that I’m writing this in my office, cool drink in hand and still missing my plot, I may just have to give Judith Gulko a call…Do you have the papers for me to sign, Judi? Am I too late?
Rotary Community Garden and Food Forest of Coral Springs 