Colonialtown Community Garden Dedication Ceremony

On Tuesday, May 25th, elected officials gathered with residents of Orlando's Colonialtown neighborhood for the grand opening of their new community garden. Trina Hofreiter, garden organizer, introduced members of the garden and officials in attendance. State Representative Scott Randolph, Mayor Buddy Dyer, County Commissioner Bill Segal, and City Commissioner Patty Sheehan all spoke briefly of their support for community gardens in urban areas. Commissioner Sheehan was particularly enthusiastic, and encouraged other neighborhoods to follow Colonialtown's example. She presented gardeners with a gnome statuette as a gesture of her appreciation. Mayor Dyer was given a large basket of recently harvested produce from the garden as thanks for the Mayor's Matching Grant that helped to fund the project. Fresh watermelon was shared by all, and a local band performed while garden members showed off their plots. If you get a chance, stop by and check out the well-designed space located at the corner of Spokane Ave. and Lake Highland St.

Simple Living at Disney's Flower Festival

We recently had a display at Walt Disney World's Flower Festival. We had park visitors stop by our display to see our fresh herbs and cucumber, the pickle maker, grow boxes, and pick up literature on how to grow organic gardens. We got to meet people from all over, surprisingly alot from Florida too.

Earth Day at Anthropologie

I had a great time at the Anthropologies store in the Millennium mall What a beautiful store! Their lively front windows are decorated with flowers made from recycled plastic. Many of their clothes are made from beautiful natural fibers. The for your home things they sell are all nature based, with lots of books on gardening and sustainability. A printed blouse I admired had beets or carrots and comes with beet or carrot seeds!

I collected emails from people who want more information about Simple Living Institute and I gave away many, many brochures. One woman exclaimed “I don’t know anyone who is into this kind of stuff, but me!” Another woman, a teacher at Oak Ridge High School, told me she gardens to relieve stress. She says, “My husband thinks I am crazy! But he eats well!” Have we ever heard that before?

I enjoyed a myriad of discussions! A young girl had just seen the movie Food Inc. and wanted to talk about Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food. Others agreed that raising awareness leads to making better choices. Notice the plastic water bottle in our display. I posed it right in front of the time line for decomposition. Several people tried to pick it up and throw it away. I happily objected! This helped them to understand that it takes 450 years to really get rid of a water bottle in the land fill. I read that only 30% of all plastic water bottles go to recycling. Our display opened some eyes that day!

The vegan food from Laina’s Ethos Vegan Kitchen opened some mouths too! I heard several people say they had never eaten humus and that they loved the roll ups that were offered there that day. How nice it was to have free food to celebrate Earth Day!

Raising awareness does lead to making better choices!

Earth Day Celebration at Anthropologie

The store Anthropologie in the Mall at Millenia is having an Earth Day celebration because they are committed to being green. They have asked SLI to bring educational materials and a visual display on this day. Set up time is 10am-11am and break down time is from 2-3pm. They will be providing us with one 8x3’ table in the center of the store for our display. Display ideas we discussed are a solar panel, plants or produce, worms, and a recycle art demo. Shayla and Karie have volunteered to man the booth at this event. We will also have our canvas bags, brochures, pictures, and a sign-up sheet for emails. The store is also buying local food from the UCF Arboretum and having it prepared by Ethos Vegan Kitchen. The store will be giving SLI a donation from a percent of the sales they do on that day.

Strawberry Season is here!

I have about 100 strawberry plants and they are just now starting to produce big red sweet juicy berries. I'm growing the Camarosa variety. I went to Pappys' Patch U-Pick Strawberry patch in north of Oviedo in the Black Hammock area. They were delicious and only $2.00 a pound there, local but not organic. They say it is too hard to grow the berries organically. Their season runs till May.

A Honey of a Organic Growers Meeting in March

Jean Vasicek was our featured speaker in March. Her introduction told us that she has a degree in Physics and worked in the Aerospace industry. Then the swicheroo! She told us how her interest in keeping bees turned into a bountiful business.

She created the company called Winter Park Honey 5 years ago and sells honey locally and all over the world.

Her stories of how she went from just being "interested" to being in business were full of toil and triumph! Her natural humor shone through her sometimes emotional explanations. Raising bees and collecting honey and bringing it to market are all laborious and time consuming. Her stellar slide show made her story quite vivid.

Jean wrapped up her presentation by explaining a few of the holistic and medicinal benefits of enjoying, especially local, honey. Many of us learned things about honey that we didn't know before!

Thankfully, she brought her divine tasting honey to sell. We bought 3 different kinds!!
Boy! we had fun guessing which was which by tasting and not looking at the labels.

http://www.winterparkhoney.com Jeans sells at many local farmer's market and on line.

Enjoy!!

Tomatoes!!!

This year I am trying a lot of different varieties of tomatoes. I started eight seeds of each and then kept the biggest and best plant of each variety for myself. I got a little carried away:)

Heres what I planted:

• Yellow Bell
• Wisconsin 55
• Zarnitza
• Brandywine
• Wickline
• Yellow Perfection
• Lollipop
• Siletz
• WA Peach
• Fantastic
• Spoon
• Ponderosa
• Stupice
• Rutgers
• Homestead