Herb Gardening for Beginners
Saturday, June 24, 11 am to noon

Learn how to plant common and not-so-common herbs, how to use their flavors in preparing meals and how to benefit from their health-giving qualities. Plus, we’ll have some favorite herb recipes to taste and share!

Instructors: Jody Lesch, Elia Woods & Timothy Trujillo
Jody is a long-time gardener, CommonWealth volunteer, native plant enthusiast and our resident “Bug Lady.” Elia is farm manager and co-founder of CommonWealth Urban Farms. Timothy is a natural healthcare provider, educator & author.

Pictured here are first graduates of CommonWealth’s apprenticeship program, alongside our staff. What a beautiful, inspiring, hardworking & good-natured group of apprentices! We hope that our apprenticeship program will help equip a new wave of people to go out and plant more urban farms, home gardens, community gardens and food forests all over our city and beyond. Congratulations and heartfelt thanks to each of you! (From left: Blaze McKenzie, Laal Shams, Harriet Porter, Morgan Vogel, Christopher Jennings, Lia Woods, Sara Braden.)Our summer apprenticeship began the first of June with seven new apprentices. I am touched to see in these new gardeners such a great desire to learn and to be of service to their communities. Stay tuned to see what happens from here! —Lia

Meet our Community Partners: A Date with Iris

A Date with Iris, in Western Avenue’s shopping district, has an eye for unique and colorful floral design. Owner Kris Balaban started the business over 12 years ago and describes their style as bespoke—or, made-to-order versus off-the-rack. Kris and her team mix traditional flowers with other botanicals to create playful arrangements filled with texture.CommonWealth connected with Kris a year ago and has been eager to supply the colors and unique elements Kris likes to use. It’s fun to see how Kris and her team incorporate our blooms into their floral masterpieces. Find out more about the shop, 4201 N. Western, & see more of their beautiful arrangements on Facebook or Twitter.—JoBeth

Meet our Team: Edith Siemens

Edith grew up working alongside her family in the vegetable fields of eastern Colorado, then alongside her husband growing vegetables near Holdenville, Ok. For 32 years, she worked as a horticulturist at the Oklahoma City Zoo, transforming grassy areas into native wildflower plantings. “There was no plant budget at first,” she says. “We went out and gathered seeds and transplanted plants from the area around the zoo.”

Not all zoo officials were accepting of the horticulture department’s “weeds,” until Edith brought a bouquet of native flowers. “That was a turning point,” she says. Edith plied the books in the zoo library, learning about plants, and helped transform the zoo into a botanical garden with 250 species of native flowers.

Retired from the zoo three years ago, Edith and her husband have turned their front, side and back yards in mid-town Oklahoma City into wildflower, zinnia and pollinator gardens with a focus on habitat for the Pipe Vine Swallowtail. She came to work part-time in CommonWealth’s Slow Flower gardens two years ago.

Working alongside Lia, she has shared her knowledge of spacing, plant characteristics (what grows aggressively, etc.,) distinguishing beneficial “weeds” (i.e., dandelions) and beneficial bugs, managing pests without chemicals, pinching instead of pruning…“I love the organic gardening at CommonWealth,” she says. “I love how the neighbors contribute to naturalistic landscaping. I love the “slow grow” philosophy. This is my dream job.”—Pat