With Spring comes the bounty of our winter 

labor, spring carrots! We were able to cook up a bunch of these carrots, combined with our blue curled leaf kale, into a delicious kale salad during our Friday cooking sessions last week!

In the classroom we are guiding students through a Plant Identification unit revolving around a number of the native and invasive plants growing around our garden. Last week we explored the beauty and generosity of Ceanothus sp. or wild lilac (my personal favorite California native) and of course the celebrity sticky monkey flower, Mimulus aurantiacus. 

As the sun continues to rise and shine longer/brighter we are gradually shifting our gardening efforts towards the preparation of a summer garden!

Our annual Easter Egg Hunt took place with four different Verde Elementary School classes. Parents and volunteers came out before hand and helped us scatter and hide the eggs, and then it was off to find plastic eggs with carrots and celery sticks inside them ;)

The Verde Partnership Garden also got some help this month from Common Vision and the Urban Tilth's Watershed Apprentice Technicians. A team of Common Vision(ers) helped lay down weed cloth and re-mulch the garden pathways- huge; not to mention their quarterly tree care visit which includes weeding around trees and adding amendments. The Urban Tilth Watershed Team put in a bio-swale (with native plants they propagated) near the resurrected habitat zone in the South-east corner of the garden, which also includes a small pond now! Next steps are to create a mini-watershed model around the bio-swale- stay tune for mini-watershed curriculum and more....

Our 'Basins of Relations' Watershed Stewardship Crew developed a partnership with Luis Chavez and the Verde Partnership Garden to help share some of our apprentices' knowledge with the students at Verde Elementary. 

In March, we scoped out the site and developed a plan for the area that will help teach students about native ecology and the interconnectedness of human and 'natural' communities within our watershed. 

Towards the end of the month we began putting this plan into action: we started building a demonstration bioswale, with much more (watershed model, educational signage, hopefully an aquaponics feature) to come!

Our 'Basins of Relations' Watershed Stewardship Crew is also formalizing an exciting new partnership with YES Families to co-lead community engagement events that emphasize engagement with natural spaces within our communities. 

To this end, we organized and led an Easter Egg Hunt and Creek Appreciation Day on 3/19, in partnership with YES.  The event was really successful: we had about 25 community members come out; everyone had fun, learned a little about the creek, and ate good food! 

After being rained out, we finally had our first Garden Party at the 1st Street Community garden. We had 25 volunteers plant spring crops, medicinal plants, weed whack, sheet mulch, cover crop, and add compost to beds. 

At the end of our time together volunteers harvested chard, strawberry mint, and chocolate mint to make delicious tea at home. 

In March on the Greenway we had the honor of hosting close to 200 volunteers! 

We celebrated the life and work of Activist and movement leader Grace Lee Boggs of Detroit Michigan. Urban Tilth partnered with Movement Generation to bring out over 100 supporters, community members, volunteers and visitors from Detroit to the Edible Forest on the Richmond Greenway. We celebrated together and honored Grace with good hands in the dirt work including weeding and planting out our raised beds with vegetable seeds to grow food for our local community.

We also had a couple of volunteer days giving the youth from our community an opportunity to give back Including hosting 50 high school students, who for our 'Love Your Block initiative' Project and to celebrate Global Youth Day of Service came out to help continue to transform the Edible Forest site, with tons of sheet mulching and weeding and trash removal, the Greenway is looking great! 

There will be many more opportunities to lend your service, support, love and energy to the Richmond Greenway. 

* Join us Every 2nd Saturday at 16th Street and 6th Street to continue to develop, maintain and build community on the Greenway from 10am - 2pm.

It's time to find a REAL, strong and beautiful name for the new "North Richmond Farm".

During March and April 2016, Urban Tilth will be asking our community to help name the North Richmond Farm! 

Do you have an idea of what the name should be?

SUBMIT YOUR NAME

 IDEA HERE

You can submit your name ideas using the online form and we will be going to community meetings, events and gatherings to gather people's ideas where you can submit name ideas in person.

We will be accepting submissions until April 30th, 2016.

 

	Permaculture for the People

Over the past 6 years Urban Tilth staff members have had the honor of being able to learn about Climate Change, Permaculture and complete a unique Permaculture Design Course (PDC) with the amazing team from 

Movement Generation and Occidental Arts and Ecology Center.  Learn a little more about the training many of our senior staff have received and the ongoing partnership we have with these inspiring organizations.