PLANTWISE

Planty, Gardeny Events This Weekend

An amazing plant sale, a very good garden tour and a really valuable volunteer opportunity

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Sep 24, 2010 at 10:15AM 0 Comments

Osmanthus x fortunei ‘San Jose’ – an acquisition from a past Cistus Design Nursery Sidewalk Sale. In case you’re wondering… this plant is a tough, cold-hardy, broadleaved evergreen shrub producing clusters of small, intensely fragrant flowers in September and October. A fantastic shrub to tuck into a nook near a doorway or path where it’s scent can drift around and surprise you!

PLANT SALE:
Cistus Design Nursery is having their “tough-love parking lot sale” with all kinds of great plants in need of a good home and for really inexpensive prices; 1g plants @ $2, 2g plants @ $4, 5g plants $10, etc. The sale kicks off Saturday, Sept 25th at 10:00am. And please, no early birds for the sale!

GARDEN TOUR:
Green on Green fall garden tour, Saturday, September 25th from 11 am to 4 pm.
Cost: tickets are $20 – available at Garden Fever and other nurseries and on the Reading Foundation website. – all proceeds from the tour help support the foundation, which hires experienced reading tutors for first through third grade student in Portland Public Schools.

The gardens, from Eastmoreland to Burlingame, include:

• Rosemary and Walt Ellis – Mahar’s neighbors with a lovely, English-style garden

• Jane Coombs and Peter Dowse – a garden designer’s garden

• Susan and Craig Latourette – another garden designer’s garden!

• Tom Masic and Joe Koutney, whose original garden layout was designed by Wallace Huntington

• Paul Beal and Michael Burns, with a fabulous, steep hillside garden

Prior to the tour, there will be a special morning presentation by Linda Beutler on Fabulous Fall Floral Arrangements from the Garden from 9:00-10:30am at Dulcy Mahar’s garden. Tickets are limited for this event — at $10 apiece — and you must be signed up for the tour to attend. Preregistration required. This event includes light breakfast treats and coffee.

VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITY:

Saturday Sept 25 8 am – will take about 6 hours.

Here’s an opportunity to support Oregon’s agricultural and farm workers through support of PCUN (Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United), an organization devoting to promoting equity in the lives of the Latino immigrant agricultural workers upon whom Oregon’s nursery industry depends.

Slow Food Portland participates in Dig In!, Slow Food USA’s national volunteer day, by helping construct a green building to be utilized as a training, education, and meeting space for Oregon’s farm and nursery workers. Volunteers will work alongside staff and members from PCUN prepping, painting, and pounding the walls of their new Leadership Training Institute.

Meet at 8am on Saturday, September 25 at the Conway parking lot in NW (1717 NW 21st Ave Portland, OR, 97209). From there, volunteers will carpool to Woodburn, OR, spend a few hours getting dirty, and then feast on a spread from a local Mexican restaurant.

Please RSVP here if you plan to attend. Bring a pair of work gloves and wear clothes you don’t mind getting dirty. And have fun – it will be great to mingle with PCUN and SLOW FOOD PORTLAND people and to learn more about what work these two organizations are doing.

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Tags: Plant Sale, Volunteer, Garden Visits

Dr. King Day of Service

Posted by: Kate Bryant on Jan 15, 2010 at 05:00AM 0 Comments

The US holiday honoring the life and civil rights work of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.. (1929-1968) is observed on the third Monday in January each year, around the time of King’s birthday (January 15).

The concept of a Day of Service in honor of Dr. King’s work was created in 1994 to challenge Americans to transform the MLK Day holiday into a day of citizen action and service in keeping with the spirit of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s own life work. In recent years, events have taken place all over the country on the MLK Day weekend.

In our fair city, the United Way of the Columbia-Willamette organizes local MLK Day of Service events. Of course, it’s really four days of service, as the schedule is pretty full from Friday January 15 to Monday January 18.

Anyway… I was scrolling down the list of volunteer events for this weekend and noticed that quite a few volunteer projects revolve around gardening.

And so, in the spirit of service to others, why not spend a few hours digging, planting trees, or removing invasive ivy? (If you haven’t yet engaged in ivy removal, you simply must – it’s a required skill for anyone living in the Pacific Northwest!) You could meet up with the horticulture team at the Zoo for a planting project, help prepare a community garden at an elementary school, plant native trees, shrubs and grasses with Friends of Trees, or remove ivy and replant natives at Tryon Creek State Park. Of course these projects provide much-needed help to these groups and organizations. But there can be unforseen benefits to you: you can learn some good basic gardening skills and you can often glean interesting insights into these organizations from the inside. Furthermore – and I speak from personal experience – you inevitably meet interesting people while volunteering.

If you don’t want to get too dirty (c’mon, don’t tell me you don’t love dirt!) or wanted to branch out a little (sorry for the pun), you could help the Community Cycling Center spiff up some bikes, assist with unpacking and sorting food at the food bank, cook or serve a meal at a homeless shelter, clean and refurbish children’s books, frame houses for Habitat for Humanity, help Free Geek recycle computers, or engage in any number of other projects. Because – as a friend pointed out – while there’s overwhelming need in the world right now, it’s always good policy to lend a hand in your own community.

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Tags: Volunteer