Grow Oak Ridge is excited to launch the first season of the “Grow Your Own: Backyard and Community” Program as a partner site with Grow Appalachia.
The mission of Grow Oak Ridge is to connect locally grown food with the public through farmers markets, community gardening and education. Grow Oak Ridge produces the Winter Farmers Market, Market-To-Go, and educational programs like Nourish Kids Club.
Katie Roach is our Garden Coach for this program. She is helping 10 Oak Ridge families grow their own food in summer 2023, and will be visiting their gardens each month, and providing them with seeds, seedlings, organic fertilizer, hand tools and education. All the families must attend educational workshops, which are also available free to the public.
Workshops are in the community room of the United Way Building, 301 Broadway Ave., Oak Ridge.
April 6, 6-8 p.m., Garden Planting and Growing Organically Workshop
May 4th, 6-8 p.m. - Maintaining an Organic Garden - Overview of insect and weed pressure that comes with organic gardening and how to battle them organically.
Thursday, June 1st, 6-8 p.m. - Harvest and Heart Healthy Cooking from the Garden Workshop
August 3rd, 6-8 p.m. Season Extension and Fall Gardening Workshop
Potluck and Closing Stories Dinner – Thursday, 6:00 PM on Thursday, September 7th, 2023
In addition to these, a canning workshop will be offered to our 10 families in a local kitchen, and because of space limitations this is not open to the general public.
Katie Roach, Garden Coach, talks to families at our first Backyard & Community Gardening workshop in March. It was held at the Oak Ridge Public Library so participants could see the seed library available to the public and get free seeds.
Grow Oak Ridge received three times the number of applicants it could accept into the program, which is funded by a grant from Grow Appalachia, a program through Berea College.
Workshops will also be available via Zoom. If you would like to receive notification about them, please sign up for our emails.
We are so grateful to the Anderson County Master Gardeners from UT Extension, who helped us kick off the program by teaching an introduction to gardening during our very first Garden Planning workshop on March 2. Our gardeners left our first meeting with an in depth intro to basic gardening and organic gardening, having potted marigold seeds (sourced from the Oak Ridge Seed Library), and started bean seeds in plastic bag greenhouses. After this meeting, we are hoping that our gardeners will submit their “garden map,” where they will apply the knowledge they learned during the Garden Planning workshop to decide on future crop rotations, how to stack tall and short plants, and how to garden efficiently in a small space without overcrowding.
In addition to designing their garden maps, we have asked our 10 gardeners to each name their garden plots. They came up with a lot of fun ideas like–”Garden of Eatin’,” “Lavender Lane,” “Our crazy lil garden,” “South 40,” “South of Eden,” and “Woodland Community Garden.” Eight of our gardeners are gardening at their residences and two are gardening in a community garden. We are so looking forward to hearing about the ways that these experiences overlap and how they will apply their gardening knowledge to their own specific gardens.
We cannot wait to see how this program grows in the lives of our participants, within our own organization, and the impact it will have in our community. I am looking forward to growing with our gardeners because this will be a learning experience for me too as my first year coordinating. I am so excited to see what the future harvest looks like for all of us.
Katie Roach and the Grow Oak Ridge staff