Community Gardens Blog
Welcome to Camarillo Community Gardens Blog
Community Gardeners
Welcome to Camarillo Community Gardens’ Blog site. This is the companion site to our main Camarillo Community Gardens web site. We will be discussing interesting and trivial ideas about the local garden and gardeners…
One thing of current importance is Opening a New Garden in Camarillo. Click here to read about and sign-up for our newest garden.
Our group, Camarillo Community Gardens, is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that is dedicated to providing gardening opportunities and education to the citizens of Camarillo and the surrounding area.
This ‘Home’ page contains the last few posts, and can cover a wide range of subjects. There are also pages with articles on different gardening subjects. You will find some interesting ideas for your garden in the videos and articles on various types of gardening. Please feel free to leave comments or questions on any post or page.
While you are here, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds listed on the right. These feeds will notify you when new posts or comments replies are made. If you have never been to a blog before, Click here for a quick video tour of this blog.
We built, planted and HARVESTED our first community garden and working on a second, larger garden! Here’s where the Antonio Garden is today – a far cry from the empty lot we started with!
Make sure to crank up the volume!
Please check out the newest video, Dr. De Soto’s talk on the Asian Citrus Psyllid and the disease and danger it brings with it to our citrus trees. The post with the Asian Citrus Psyllid video is here.
(aside:)
A number of you with big photo albums have asked how I made the Antonio Garden celebration video, so I put up a blog about my Digital Slide Shows made with Animoto here…
There is a lot of information packed away in these pages. Read the First article: Vegetable Gardening Basics
UC Davis News & Information :: New Kellogg Foundation endowment targets healthy food for kids
Posted by mike in School Gardens on August 12, 2010
A gift of nearly $1.6 million from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to the University of California, Davis, will support a national network that will focus on improving children’s access to healthy food.
The $1.57 million gift creates an endowment that will be managed by the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis to support in perpetuity the Inter-institutional Network for Food, Agriculture and Sustainability, a network of scholars from 14 universities. A primary goal of the network will be to improve food-system sustainability to advance the health of people, society and the natural environment. The Kellogg funds will enable the network to nurture a diverse corps of scholars in the early stages of their careers who will lead initiatives to address food-system challenges.
“This gift recognizes the work of leaders from across the United States, and I am gratified that my colleagues in the network have endorsed the UC Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute as the network’s host,” said Tom Tomich, the W.K. Kellogg Endowed Chair in Sustainable Food Systems at UC Davis and director of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute. “We also are grateful to the Kellogg Foundation for supporting such important work,” Tomich said.
Neal Van Alfen, dean of the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, also emphasized the gift’s importance. “UC Davis is recognized globally for its agricultural and environmental research and is a leader in scientific study of sustainability,” he said. “This investment by the Kellogg Foundation will allow us to work nationally with colleagues to identify the most critical issues in agricultural and food-system sustainability and to provide solutions toward sustainable food systems for everyone.”
The network includes scholars from Iowa State University and its Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Michigan State University, North Carolina A&T State University, North Carolina State University, Ohio State University, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Minnesota, University of New Hampshire, University of New Mexico, University of Vermont, University of Wisconsin and Washington State University. Additional institutions and scholars will be added in the future.
About the W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Established in 1930, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation supports children, families and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society. Its grants are concentrated in the U.S., Latin America, the Caribbean and southern Africa. More information about the foundation is available online at: http://www.wkkf.org.
About the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis
UC Davis’ Agricultural Sustainability Institute, founded in 2006, is committed to helping ensure access to healthy food and promoting the vitality of agriculture today and for future generations by coordinating integrative research, education and communication efforts. It includes the UC statewide Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP), the UC Davis Russell Ranch Sustainable Agriculture Facility and the UC Davis Student Farm. More information from the institute is available online at: http://www.asi.ucdavis.edu.
This is welcome news from the U.C. Davis website. Let’s hope some of that funding winds up in our local school system!
Starting new school gardens
Posted by mike in Community Gardens, School Gardens on August 1, 2010
Camarillo Community Garden members, staff and parent from La Mariposa School, and the Ventura County Master Gardeners led a huge work party / educational event Saturday July 31st. The school provided materials and eager students to build a dozen new 8′ x 4′ x 1′ raised garden beds. The master Gardeners led the educational portion of the day while we provided guidance to build the beds. A special thanks to Karl for his never-ending enthusiasm and sense of civic duty.
The kids at the school turned out in force. Some of them worked all day and out-lasted their dads. It was a great experience for them to do so much of the work, from digging up sprinkler heads and filling the holes back in, to building the boxes and filling them.
Check out the video of the day’s doings…
Second Season Garden
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Camarillo Community Garden In the News
Posted by mike in Community Gardens, Gardening on July 9, 2010
This last week was amazing. We had a very nice piece written about us in the Ventura County Star. Not only were we in the first section on page A-3, but we also got a headline blurb on the Masthead directing people to the article. That is Star treatment! If you missed the article in the paper, you can read the article here: An Idea to Grow On
This was a great article showcasing a number of the gardeners who were interviewed on site. It also kicked off the rest of the week. It led immediately to a surprise call from Ami from KCAL News asking for permission to visit us at the garden. When I arrived, there was a satellite trunk parked in front of the garden, and a reporter and cameraman/video editor working the crowd. They went live at 12:30 and gave us a wonderful segment seen all over California! If you missed the broadcasts (we were on at noon, 2:00 and 4:00) you can see it on-line here: Our Field of Dreams.
The next day I was asked to go on the radio with “Two Moms and a Mic” on KKZZ Radio 1400. Sandy and Kim (the 2 Moms) are rated as #1 in California for “Positive Talk Radio” – a very refreshing change from the negative, inflammatory ‘news’ programs on TV and radio. The ladies were delightful, and interested enough to walk the garden prior to the show. They gave me a chance to talk about our garden, the new garden, and several programs relating to school and community gardens.
In a moment of Kismet, Sandy’s kids attend La Mariposa School here in Camarillo, the same site where the Master Gardeners will be holding a school and community garden building class at the end of July (you can read more about this program on sustainabe-landscaping.net.
Ans one more article featuring us is now on the news stands (that is such an antiquated term) in “805 Living” Magazine. I have not seen it yet (going to get a copy today – go get yours!), but I did a peek at an early draft of the article and it looks like we are the lead off to Billy Goodnick’s article. Check it out!
This exposure has been a boon – we have had a constant stream of inquiries, sign-ups for information and a BUNCH of new gardeners are now on our waiting list. This is good publicity (and much easier to take than Lindsey Lohan’s jail time!).
Free Training for Volunteers
Posted by mike in Community Gardens, Gardening on June 16, 2010
School / Community Garden Training
Presented by the Ventura County Master Gardeners
The “Community and School Gardening Class” is a new, hands-on training program to train volunteers who are willing to create more community and school gardens. This free course is provided by the Ventura County Master Gardeners. The course will train YOU and other volunteers and give you all the basic knowledge required to successfully start a new community or school garden.
The programs will be given in a live situation – you will work with the Master Gardeners and create new garden plots at La Mariposa School. At the end of the day, there should be a cadre of trained volunteers who will continue to build more gardens in more schools and neighborhoods. This school was chosen because of it’s HUGE commitment to teaching about food, and for their dedication of food plots to aid the hungry.
Our first training class will be held on July 31st, starting at 9:30 at La Mariposa School in Camarillo, 4800 Corte Olivas, Camarillo; a map to the training site is below.
Watch this video to learn more about the training. Then enter your name and e-mail in the box at the Sustainable-Landscaping.net to join the training session. Make sure to enter your e-mail correctly as reminders and information regarding the course will be sent there.
Go to Sustainable-Landscaping.net to sign-up for this free, ‘hands-on’ course. Information, schedules, maps and news will be sent to this address. Until then, here is the map to the garden training site! Be sure to add your name to the list!
You can do this! Sign up here for this free class!
4800 Corte Olivas
Recognizing Volunteers
Gardening Programs Run on Volunteers
We appreciate all our volunteers for all the time, money and effort spent to make our projects come alive. The ‘Antonio’ video celebrates the hard work and dedication of the volunteers and sponsors who built the Antonio Garden.
The Master Gardeners also celebrate their volunteers. For those of you who don’t already know, the Master Gardeners are University trained volunteers. They are the public face of the program, and have the classroom and field experience they need to help you find the answers to your gardening questions.
Each Master Gardener accepts an both educational and volunteer obligations along with the training. They provide training for the home gardener, man a telephone helpline (645-1455) to answer your gardening questions and provide you with research and resources. They train and operate from the Hansen Agricultural Center, maintain gardens at the Camarillo House, work the Conejo Valley Botanic Garden, provide public speakers, are active in wetland restoration and work on university research projects.
I created the video below for the Master Gardener’s Volunteer Recognition dinner. Watch it and get to know your new gardening friends. If you have bandwidth issues and the video stalls, you can switch to lo-res mode on the player control bar.
If you are interested in learning more about the Master Gardener program, just click the link at the end of the video!
Asian Citrus Psyllid
The Asian Citrus Psyllid (ACP) is a small insect, smaller than aphids, and capable of wiping out our 26,000 acres of commercial citrus. We are also in danger of losing all out backyard citrus trees as well, and there are more of those home trees than in commercial production.
This tiny insect, and the disease it carries, have cost Florida half its citrus acreage in just 5 years. The disease has yet to reach us, but the insect is at our door, and it may be here on the next east wind.
Without the public’s help and careful observation, we can all say good bye to orange juice. And lemons. And I hope you like your beer without lime…
Here is Dr. De Soto’s message to us delivered during our EarthDay Camarillo celebration. I apologize in advance for the sound and picture quality.
(NOTE: If this video is slow to load, try the lighter version below)
For more information on the ACP, please visit the Ventura County Master Gardener’s website.
Here is a video showing how to identify this pest. UC citrus entomologist Beth Grafton-Cardwell, Ph.D., explains how to monitor citrus trees for Asian citrus psyllid. Suspected infestations of Asian citrus psyllid should be reported immediately by calling the county agriculture commissioner or the CDFA hotline at (800) 491-1899.
This movie, “Excluding a Bad Citrus Pest“, shows the effects in Florida and warns of the effect we will suffer if the pest is established.
Matilija Poppy Festival
Posted by mike in Community Gardens, Gardening on April 12, 2010
Sandy from the Conejo Valley Botanic Garden has sent out an invitation to the Matilija Poppy Festival on May 2, 2010. The Conejo Valley Botanic Gardens are 33 acres of unique terrain in Thousand Oaks offering panoramic views of the Conejo Valley and abundant opportunities for education, conservation and recreation.
While a significant portion of the Garden’s acreage is reserved to provide a natural habitat for birds and small animals, the developed area of the Garden includes displays of water-conserving plants from California, the Mediterranean, and Australia as well as several specialty gardens.
The event will provide activities for children, garden tours, and introduction to the ‘California All-Stars’, a selection of worthy but under-utilized native plants – all star performers.
This event will be held at the gardens. For information on the event, the garden, and directions, please visit the Conejo Valley Botanic Gardens website.
Here is the event flier (click for a full size pdf copy):
Earth Day Celebration
Camarillo Community Gardens is hosting an earth Day celebration! This will be Camarillo’s first Earth Day. For more information, see our new Earth Day Camarillo blog! The blog is now is live and will be growing… You can leave your e-mail on the blog to get involved with the Earth Day planning…
How can you help?
Lots of ways… How about submitting a graphic for our Logo? The best submission will be used as our Earth Day logo. Your art work should reflect the theme “Growing Healthy Families”
When to Plant Vegetables
“When to Plant Vegetables” is a really complex question. In California alone, there are 27 different climate zones, from tide pools to frozen rocky crags. In between the extremes, there are many combinations of long season (mild winter) and short season (short, hot summers and cold winters).
There is a web site I found with good information on when you can plant different types of garden veggies. the site lists plants and planting dates for many veggies with dates given for both long and short seasons. With spring coming I thought I would share this link with you: When to Plant Vegetables
With the wide variety of climates in the world, local information is always best. Check with your gardening neighbors, your local extension service or your local Master Gardeners.
As an alternative, there is some cool software that helps you adjust your starting, growing and harvesting dates. Check out GroVeg, the on-line garden planner. There is a good write-up on it on this vegetable garden design software review page.
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