By John Stolzle | Garden Manager
Our warm weather this fall provided Jovial Concepts with a wonderful opportunity to more thoroughly explore the end of season harvest with volunteers and friends from Revel, Laradon, and Activity Options. We discussed the process of putting the gardens to rest for the season with a hands-on activity where we talked about plants’ life cycle and shared the importance of seed saving with volunteers. This was followed by the planting of cover crops, and winter crops which will be ready for harvest in the spring. The warm weather allowed us to make multiple days out of this broad lesson and incorporate a secondary project, detailed in the next paragraph, as opposed to quickly wrapping up after an early fall snow which would have provided a definite end-cap for the season.
This past quarter, Jovial Concepts undertook a campaign to inform our community about the benefits of not raking up fallen tree leaves. Leaf litter is home to many important insects in our ecosystem, and these insects provide our bird population with plenty of food. Allowing your leaves to decompose also naturally provides vital nutrients to the soil, improving the health of your lawn and garden landscape. It also reduces the carbon impact associated with transporting leaves and landfills.
In addition to speaking with our community, we provided a location where leaves could be dropped off and reused; with the help of our volunteers, we used these donated leaves to cover our Jovial Garden beds this past fall. In total through canvassing, we reached 250 neighbors, many of whom were excited to learn about the benefits of leaving their leaves on the ground and not bagging them. By the end of our campaign, we had received over 90 bags of tree leaves and calculated that this project saved over 1200lbs of leaves from being sent to landfills. All the while, this material provided an excellent opportunity to connect our community and more efficiently use our resources.
Our hope is to encourage our community to become more sustainable, and make real change in a small amount of time. We do this through education and by connecting our community and establishing more sustainable practices. We want our actions to become established practices in our community, and this is at the center of everything Jovial Concepts does. From our lessons about seed saving with volunteers, to garden and food systems development, to community engagement, we want to create healthier, more robust, and better connected communities. We have many plans for 2022, and many opportunities to do just this.
Happy 2022 everyone!
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