LOCAL Garden: 2023 in Review
The LOCAL garden had wonderful spring and summer season in 2023, hosting school field trips, regular volunteer groups, new programs, and people of all ages to enjoy the process of tending to a community garden. The fall brought an intensive focus on the invasive jumping worm, but our invasive educational outreach actually put LOCAL garden in the spotlight throughout Bath and the surrounding communities – reaching hundreds of new people to hear about the efforts of the community garden while we unified against this new but widespread garden issue. Read on to hear about the garden year season by season, and a special thank you to our longtime garden coordinator, Laurie Burhoe!
“I am so grateful for this community that you have created. I am thankful for the new friends I’ve made, the new skills I’ve learned, the new foods I’ve fallen in love with (tomatillos!!), and for this space where people and plants work together as partners.”
Food Donation: 927 pounds!
In total, LOCAL Garden contributed almost a thousand pounds of produce to the free sharing tables for families experiencing food insecurity in Bath.
Spring
West Bath School students spring planting. KELT 2023.
The LOCAL Garden opened in 2023 with a month of field trips with Dike Newell Elementary School in Bath and West Bath School, where over one hundred kids came to the garden to experience planting seedlings – a triumphant return of education programming after years of pandemic field trip cancellations. The students cultivated sunflower seedlings in their classrooms under the instruction of Laurie, then planted them in the garden at the end of May. Those sunflowers grew to towering heights and were a sight to behold to all future visitors! Teachers continued to love our nature-based educational programming, and kids walked away with a new knowledge of how food and plants grow from seed to end up on our tables.
Thank you to our dedicated volunteer groups: Elmhurst joined us on Mondays for gardening and enrichment programs for adults living with disabilities and our community volunteers joined us on Tuesdays. Volunteers came from so many community partners: the Wayfinder program which supports students pursuing high school diplomas at home, Waypoint which supports RSU1 students with adult mentors and peer support, and many more.
Summer
Parent and Baby in the Garden summer tasting. KELT 2023.
In the summer, KELT hosted a storybook walk through the community garden, posting the pages of the children’s book “Up in the Garden, Down in the Dirt” so that visitors could read a story as they walked around the beds throughout the month of June. In July, KELT brought a new program to the garden to great success – Parent and Baby in the Garden. This program was generated from a need identified by new parents in the community, a space where parents could connect and young babies and toddlers could run around and learn about gardens during their very first years. Four weeks in a row, the numbers of parents in the garden steadily grew, and all participants were brand new to KELT programming. On one hot July day, 11 families sat around exchanging names and expressing compassion for new parenthood, while toddlers tasted their first raspberries, learned to water plants, and tried cucumbers they wouldn’t even touch at home.
Fall
Jumping Worm Wrangling. KELT 2023.
Thanks to our dedicated volunteer group from Elmhurst, the fall brought the story we are all now familiar with – KELT discovered invasive jumping worms in our garden beds. Identifying and learning about the worms became our mission, and KELT worked tirelessly (with a few sleepless nights) to reckon with this discovery. From the moment we found them, we vowed to be forthright with this new invasive - if we had to deal with jumping worms, at least it could be a learning opportunity for our community. And what a learning experience it has been! Our virtual lecture on jumping worms with entomologist Brittany Schappach had over 200 registered participants, and the recording has been viewed almost a thousand times in a month. We invited the Morse High School 9th grade ecology class to a garden field trip, adding 40 more students to our field trip numbers, to remove adult worms and take soil samples back to study.
This whirlwind of activity has put KELT and LOCAL Garden at the center of productive and proactive conversations around invasive management. While it interrupted our typical garden programming for the fall, we have actually served more community members with our worm education initiatives and from a broader audience.
Looking Ahead
KELT is determined to take the momentum of our rollercoaster of a 2023 garden year and bring a renewed vigor to garden programming. Over the winter, our focus will be on finding a great fit for our new garden coordinator and establishing our best practices for gardening with jumping worms. We have created an amazing coalition of local partners to take on that task, and look forward to the 2024 garden season!
Thank You Laurie and Volunteers!
Volunteer Appreciation Potluck. KELT 2023.
As the fall garden season closed, we took an important moment to pause and thank Laurie Burhoe, garden coordinator since 2013. We had a garden potluck to close out the season, and volunteers and KELT staff shared appreciation for her hard work. KELT coordinated messages from Laurie’s garden community past and present.
In her final year as garden coordinator, Laurie built such a dedicated volunteer base – 15 people were on the regular rotation for Tuesdays and accomplished an extraordinary amount of work. While most people joined the garden in order to give back to Bath and use their gardening skills, what they found was community.
“I am so appreciative of what you have started in Bath. It’s a wonderful educational tool for all, and an overall gem in the community. Bath is very important to me and it’s a lovely feeling having members of the city also care and see opportunities that matter and make it happen.”