Victory Gardens San Diego
Connecting San Diego's Local Food Web
17 Organizations, over 500 Members. . . plus you?
Working hand-in-hand with several San Diego food-movement groups, VGSD encourages and assists in the development of sustainable, healthy, Earth-friendly home, community and school food gardens throughout the San Diego area.
Click here to go to Upcoming Gardening Events and Workshop notices.
Gift-Giving Program
Over the holiday season, Victory Gardens San Diego invited community members to give a gift that tastes good all year long: a donation to in the name of someone you love.
Results: we raised over $6600!
When combined with our matching donation from an anonymous benefactor for everything up to $5000, the campaign raised over $11,600 for VGSD and our parent organization, San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project!
Your generosity will go a long way in supporting positive growth and continued work in 2010.
Want to make a gift? Click here to go to the Gift Program page.
We hope you'll help us "Grow it forward" by lending your financial support to our efforts with a gift to honor friends and family.
Vol. 8 VGSD Newsletter November-December 2009
Recent Projects
Jensen-Elliot Garden Build
Saturday, December 19, Twelve VGSD volunteers and homeowner Cindy Jensen Elliott double dug, installed a drip irrigation system and cast seed over Cindy's new garden. Cindy was our Garden Guide and is a garden educator at the High Tech High Elementary School at Liberty Station. As the video shows, there was a whole lot of diggin' going on (all video was shot between 10 and 10:30 am).
By 2pm, Cindy's garden was redesigned, double dug, compost enriched, irrigated and ready for seed. Thanks to our super vounteers Devon, Eddie, Cindy Z., Tia, Kyle, Alyson, Richard (our time lapse photographer!), Conroy, Jackie (and daughter Zoe!) and Diana. It's was a very nice holiday gift.
Procopio Garden
On October 17, under the guidance of Garden Guide Katherine Placey, six volunteers installed a raised bed and herb garden at the Procopio's home in Chula Vista. using a basic raised bed model developed at earlier builds, the VGSD team created a wonderful edible garden. Mrs. Procopio works with the Gerson Institute, an organization dedicated to alternate health therapies for people with cancer and other serious diseases. one of their principle tenets is eating fresh raw fruits, vegetables and herbs. The Procopios subscribe to this healthy diet and may be bringing extra produce to the Gerson Institute in downtown San Diego.
Thanks again to Katherine, Michael, Britta, Ellie, Yvonne, Natalie, and James for their hard work.
Halloween in the Wolf Garden
On Halloween Day, about 13 (hmmmm!) VGSD'ers "treated" Michael Wolf to a backyard garden, simple drip irrigation system and a compost bin area. After moving soil and mulch up a steep ramp to the backyard, volunteers, dug, planted (cilantro,chives, parsley, brocolli, onions, chard, spinach garlic and more) and built throughout the morning, sustained by treats provided by Donna Wolf, a recent VGSD University of Gardening graduate, and Michael's mom! We were done by about noon. Many thanks to our Garden Guide, Marc Bailey, who both directed our efforts and educated us as well. Thanks also to our volunteersCassie, Yvette, Donna, Pat, Cindy, Julianna, Sara, Patricia, Kevin and Amber for their hard work. You make creating a garden in three hours seem easy...and definitely fun!
What's coming up
We still have a couple more projects for the month of December. Look in your email for volunteer sign-up opportunities. There are several more activities, events and celebrations going on in December in support of the local food movement. Check the listings below for more information.
In the new year we have many projects tasking shape from Oceanside to Chula Vista. I'll share more as the need for volunteers comes up for each one. Thanks to your financial support and energy, we look forward to helping grow the San Diego local healthy food movement stronger in 2010
Finally...
During this season of appreciation, many thanks to all of you for your creativity, enthusiasm, financial donations, donations of time and energy and just your commitment to strengthening the local foodshed . Since April, we've been able to help build or assist in the development of over 17 home, school, community, or organizational gardens throughout San Diego. There are that many and more being planned for 2010. This couldn't have been done without the leadership and guidance of the many organizations listed on our webpage.
One of our initial goals was to help raise the awareness of all the outstanding garden development, garden advocacy, farm support, food justice and nutrition awareness work being done by many groups. As we continue to collaborate on these issues, the winners are San Diegans everywhere.
VGSD has over 600 people interested in and supporting our efforts. That's up from zero when we started the website about 8 months ago! We can't do this without your support. As an all volunteer organization, we depend on your donations of both money and time. I hope you'll strongly consider donating to our VGSD/Roots Giving Campaign this holiday season. It's easy and will make a clear statement about your commitment to healthy local food for you, your loved ones and our entire San Diego community. Happy holidays!
Join VGSD Online!
Always seeking to expand of gardening community, the VGSD Action Committee took steps to give us a broader E- presence via Google, Facebook and Twitter. Thanks to Cynthia for managing our "Tweets", about upcoming events involving VGSD and/or our partners. Thanks also to Julianna for developing our Facebook page and Erin for creating our Google site. Below are the links to each site. I encourage you to sign up and stay connected with VGSD and our partners. We want to build an interactive San Diego garden community and these sites will allow for questions and discussions regarding garden and food issues. Here are the links to each site:
Tell a friend about VGSD.
Donate!
Participate!
Educate!
Thanks for your
enthusiasm and support!