Garden School 2022!

Garden School attendees gather in the Food Forest
Instructor Stephanie Jordan leads a class
Allen holds a handful of compost during a class
A young Garden School attendee plants seeds during a class

We are excited about our new offerings this year, including CommonWealth Fests! In collaboration with some of our newer and younger volunteers, we are mixing up the garden school schedule to provide three free, family-friendly, educational festivals starting with our Wildcrafting & Herb Fest on May 14. In addition to providing a new format and activities to the community, we are excited to provide leadership development to our volunteers who are stepping up in the organization and execution of the events. Here’s our class schedule and keep an eye on our website’s Garden School Page for detail updates.

2022 Garden School Calendar

March 12^th How to Grow a Vegetable Garden Even If
You’ve Never Planted a Seed in Your Life – Elia Woods

March 26^th Birding for Beginners

April 9^thCommunity Gardening & Garden Construction Part 1
LaTasha Timberlake + hands-on workshop

April 23^rd
Garden Construction Part 2 – Hands-on workshop

April 30^thPlanting the Path for Monarchs – Stephanie Jordan

May 14^th Wildcrafting & Herb Fest

June 11^th Bug Fest

July 9^th Beekeeping

Aug 13^th Plant a Fall Salad Garden – Elia Woods

Sept 10 Raising Butterflies
Jennifer Plato, Holly Hunter, Stephanie Jordan

Sept 24^thSoil & Compost & Recycling Fest

Oct 8^th Backyard Fruit Production

Oct 22^ndPotluck in the Garden

Nov 26^thThe Great Pumpkin Smash

2022 Partner Farmers

Ryan Smith, Alana Stuart, Tesa Linville,
Jenn Mabry, Sylvia Yego, Lia Woods

The Giving Garden OKC
2022 is going to be quite the change for Giving Garden OKC as we transition to our new location on NW 23rd Street. But we are still planning on growing food at CommonWealth. Currently we have beets, carrots, radishes, turnips, chard, kale, lettuce germinating under the tunnels. We built trellises for peas and fava beans—both nitrogen-fixers. Still in discussions on how best the space can be used for us as we move into the growing season. We will donate the produce or market it to bring in much-needed cash flow to support our non-profit. We are looking forward to our continued partnership and support with CommonWealth Urban Farms.
Jenn Mabry

Lia’s Garden at CommonWealth
I took a bit of time-off over the winter to recharge my batteries, including lots of long walks in the woods. Now I’m starting hundred of seeds every week, and our compost-heated greenhouse is keeping my baby plants warm and happy through these up and down temperatures. Even after decades of gardening, I still get a thrill every time I see that first tiny sprout emerge from an even tinier seed. My seedling sales will start in mid-March with broccoli & cauliflower, followed by a slew of other vegetables, herbs and native perennial seedlings. Restraint is not my forte when browsing through seed catalogs, so expect to see some new varieties on my seedling tables this spring!
Elia Woods

Sabou
This is Tesa’s third year growing cut and edible flowers both in the field and in the hoop house at CommonWealth. She has expanded her growing operation at her Oklahoma City home as well and already thousands of tiny plants are keeping warm in her compost-heated greenhouse. Once warm weather is here to stay, transplanting will begin, joining flowers wintering over in the field. This winter she also has successfully experimented with flowering plants in her greenhouse. Imagine: Dianthus, calendula and pansy harvesting all winter! She sells her cut flowers to florists and you can reach her about purchasing edibles by contacting her through the Paseo Farmer’s Market.
Tesa Linville

Elgon Gardens
This season at Elgon gardens we will be planting kale and spinach.
We are awaiting seven rows of spinach to germinate that was planted late last year; five rows will be for kale. Later we will have five short rows of tomatoes. All these will be for family consumption.
Everlyn, Sylvia, Veronica

Ryan Smith and Alana Stuart
Alana Stuart is a new Partner Farmer at Commonwealth. Growing up in a food desert in Chicago, Alana was determined to understand how our food systems operated. This led her on a quest to travel and work on permaculture communities to learn about regenerative farming.Landing in our nation’s main food hub, California, she tended land and worked on a no-till, bio-diverse, women-owned, agroecological farm. Now in Oklahoma City, she hopes to continue to care for land that nourishes the neighborhood while building community around it. This year she will work alongside Ryan to help create a community garden space at Commonwealth, where volunteers can come to learn more about growing annual vegetables on a no-till plot, making compost teas and other ferments that help rejuvenate the soil. When her hands are not working with the land she loves to homestead, preserving bounties from the garden, making ferments and cooking for loved ones. Alana Stuart

Gosh, that was heartwarming! Harvest Potluck in the Garden

As always, our annual celebration of community, food, music was delightful. It was a beautiful autumn day on the farm and we enjoyed it with many friends.

The Great Pumpkin Smash

Saturday, November 27
This family-friendly event is free.
Drop in between 9 am and noon.
1016 NW 32nd St.
What to do with all those pumpkins, once Thanksgiving is over and cold weather sets in? Bring them and the kids to CommonWealth, where we’ll make a big compost pile and everybody can toss and smash pumpkins to their hearts’ delight. Messy fun for the whole family! You can bring your leftover hay bales, too, and we’ll add them to the mix.

And this very special free class: Using Compost as Heat Source for Growing Seedlings

Saturday, November 27th
11 am to noon – free class

1016 NW 32nd, OKC 73118

Learn how to take advantage of the heat produced from a compost pile to create a warm space to get your seedlings started this winter! We’ll use some of those smashed pumpkins from the Great Pumpkin Smash to start building a compost bin inside our greenhouse, and demonstrate the elements of successful hot bed. This low-tech method of producing heat can be used under a low tunnel or inside a greenhouse; we’ll show examples of each.

Hey Partner Farmers: What’s happening on the farm?

Lia thinks of the summer garden—tomatoes, okra, cucumber vines—as the “tall garden.” Well, it’s time now for the “short garden:” root crops and low-growing greens. In the field, our partner-farmers are growing cold-hardy greens (lettuce, spinach, kale) with row-covers at the ready for those freezing nights. The women of Elgon Gardens are growing garlic too and trimming up the asparagus. Ryan Smith has planted cover crops to further nourish the soil on his rows. Jenn Mabry and her volunteers are weeding the rows, harvesting early fall lettuce, carrots and radishes—and seeding more winter greens.

In the warmth of the hoop house on those sunny winter days, the lettuce, spinach, arugula, kale growing there will warm your heart as well! Tesa has flower seedlings planted in the hoop house, so watch her space for early spring booms!

Lia just placed a big seed order for native perennials that she’ll start in our greenhouse over the winter—including more varieties of Oklahoma natives. Too, she’s honing her skills at taking cuttings from perennial herbs, like rosemary and lavender, that are hard to start from seed but propagate well. Soon the greenhouse will be full of trays and trays of baby plants, a happy respite from cold weather outside!

Our Food Forest is Growing!

Have you ever tasted a pawpaw? Or even heard of them? Native to North America but tasting like the tropics, pawpaws have been described as having a custard-like flavor of mango-banana-pineapple. Because they bruise easily and have a short shelf life, pawpaws are best grown locally. We just planted 4 varieties of pawpaw on the south end of CommonWealth’s food forest. It will be a few years before they begin to produce, but it’s not all delayed gratification; for the last month, we’ve been harvesting figs every week from a tree we planted several years ago. Fresh figs in November!

CommonWealth’s Amazing New Resource

Using Compost as a Heat Source for Growing Seedlings on Hot Beds and in Greenhouses

Hot off the press! We’ve just completed a how-to video series and written guide on using compost to create hot beds for starting seedlings in the winter without relying on fossil fuels.

Thanks to the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry for grant funding to provide these educational materials free of charge. You can find more information and links to them at http://commonwealthurbanfarms.com/compost-heating/

Garden School Classes in September

Raising Butterflies

Saturday, Sept. 11

11 am – noon
1016 NW 32nd St.
$10 per workshop,
$15 per couple/pair.
Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!

There is magic in the Monarch chrysalis! Were you one of the lucky children whose teacher kept one in the classroom? Not only is a beautiful experience, raising butterflies is helpful! Fewer than 10 percent of monarch eggs and larvae will survive to become adult butterflies, largely due to predation of the larvae. Raising them in an indoor habitat boosts survival to rates well over 90 percent. A panel of experts will show participants how and where to look for butterfly eggs and larvae and how to support them as they go through their amazing transformation.

The first 10 educators get in free and there will be door prizes and giveaways.

Instructors: Holly Hunter is a retired IT professional who now spends her time gardening for wildlife. She runs a Monarch Way Station for her local library in Warr Acres, and she works with Okies For Monarchs and the Master Gardeners to install pollinator gardens in public spaces.

Jennifer Klein Plato provides habitat for Monarchs and Black Swallowtails at her home garden, Waystation. Last year alone, Jennifer raised and released over 150 monarch butterflies.

Stephanie Jordan is the Pollinator Outreach Coordinator for The Nature Conservancy of Oklahoma, and she does education and outreach for Okies for Monarchs. She has extensive experience raising, championing, and advocating for Monarchs and other pollinators. For several years she grew
native and other pollinator plants to sell at farmers markets and
festivals. She lives in the CommonWealth community.

Raising Backyard Hens

Saturday, Sept. 25
11 am – noon
1016 NW 32nd St.
$10 per workshop,
$15 per couple/pair.
Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!

Have you ever thought about keeping backyard chickens? Hens are fun and easy pets to include in your life, and they lay eggs, too! Come meet a couple of local hens and learn everything you need to know about raising and taking care of your own flock.

Instructor: Sara Braden has been sharing her backyard with chickens since 2009.

Let’s Bug Out at CommonWealth

Saturday, September 18 at 11:30 am

1016 NW 32nd, OKC OK 73118

We had another great day searching for bugs in our own back yard in August! We hope to see you here for our next adventure. Join us in the Food Forest at CommonWealth on the 3rd Saturday of each month as we peer into the world of tiny insects buzzing, hopping, crawling, and flying around the garden. We’ll have magnifying glasses and bug guides on hand to help identify these fascinating creatures. All ages are welcome.

Hey Partner Farmers: What’s happening on the farm?

Jenn Mabry
The Giving Garden OKC

Fall is on its way and we couldn’t be happier. Cover crops, root crops, and greens are what we are focusing on this month. We are looking forward to cooler weather as we tend to get more volunteers when it cools down, Giving Garden OKC also has a new website that was built and designed by our Girl Scout troop and it’s amazing. Check it out!
https://okcgivinggarden.wixsite.com/grow. For more information on how to get involved through volunteering and/or donations, please email givinggardenokc@gmail.com.

Elia Woods – Lia’s Garden at CommonWealth

I’m eager for the end of hot weather and the arrival of fall! But I had a bountiful harvest of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, & okra this summer, so I can’t complain too much about the weather. Cabbage worms, grasshoppers, and harlequin beetles damaged most of my fall veggie transplants, which is a bit discouraging, but I’ve got a second round of them started and hopefully can keep the bugs off. I have a good selection of native perennials available for sale all month. Fall is an excellent time to transplant perennials; the warm soil and mild-fall weather promote good root growth before winter, and give the plants a big head start over perennials planted in the spring. But Little Bear, our farm kitten, is growing faster than any of them! Lia’s Garden at CommonWealth.

Tesa Linville – Sabou

I’m eager to see the flowers on Rosella pop out. There’s a good stand and chefs are ordering the leaves for sauces. Besides harvesting sunflowers, zinnias, marigolds, celosia, I’m planning for fall and winter plantings of edibles in the greenhouse and hoop house.

Everlyn, Sylvia, Veronica – Elgon Gardens

The Elgon Farm has had a successful planting season with no unsolvable challenges. The farm has had bountiful tomato harvest and we’ve been fortunate to have a great opportunity to sell our produce at Paseo Farmers Market. We keep learning new things like tomatoes going dormant when there’s prolonged period of high temperatures. Now here comes fall and we will shift our efforts to growing kale and carrots.

Ryan Smith

This Summer was HOT, HOT and HOT! June and July saw an over abundance of tomatoes and peppers and now August and September brought us the problem of too much okra!! Garden- fresh salads and salsas got me through these intense weather months. Coming up this Fall we’re planning on row after row of a variety of salad greens and hoping our tomatoes can hold on just a little longer before it starts getting cold again! This summer was exceptionally edifying to my life. Getting to learn and grow alongside the CommonWealth community from Spring season to now quickly melted all the cold frigidity we were all feeling back in February:) So I raise my overgrown Okra pod to all the beautiful things that come along with Fall!

Meet our Partner Farmers

Ryan Smith

Ryan Smith came to CommonWealth to volunteer with Lia gardening on the farm. The foundational component of a healthy garden—composting—intrigued him and he hooked up with the composting team, where he learned a lot. “Composting showcases the problem with food waste and distribution and gardening for soil, not plants,” he said when we profiled him in this newsletter as a volunteer. “I’m becoming a dirt nerd.”

Indeed he did. And now he is a Partner-Farmer at CommonWealth. He grows vegetables in the first several rows of the farm.

Ryan grew up in Grapevine, Texas, attended Oklahoma Baptist University, worked in child social services in Oklahoma City before returning to Texas, to Austin, where he worked for Habitat for Humanity and AmeriCorps and volunteered on a commercial farm supporting AmeriCorps. It was there he began to appreciate what he called “real food.”

After he and wife Mary Ann moved back to Oklahoma for her doctoral work at OU, it has been at CommonWealth, as volunteer and as the neighborhood handyman, that he has come to appreciate community. “It’s almost a religious experience here,” he said.

Mary Ann helps with weeding as her time allows. Ryan has the experiences of his first spring and summer seasons as a partner-farmer urging him forward. “In this space with fantastic soil, I’ve been surprised how easy it’s been,” he says. “Put down compost, put down plants…We had tomatoes, okra, shishito, jalapeno, marconi peppers.”

“I even made my first unofficial sale when Sylvia needed some peppers to fill an order they had. I got a check for $50!”

Next year Ryan hopes to focus on what it takes to grow enough okra to sell. This fall, his main focus is on planting and growing salad greens and a couple of rows of cover crops. And his big dream would bring him full circle at CommonWealth: As he came to the farm to volunteer in the garden, he wants next to find a way to bring more volunteers to garden with him, and provide fresh vegetables for them to take home.

Join us at the Prairie Dinner

Green Connections’ annual Prairie Dinner is coming up! It’s an evening outdoors in a beautiful setting (this year, the Harn Homestead, in OKC) with people who support life on Earth enjoying locally-grown food (our friends at Kam’s Kookery provide the scrumptious feast) and smooth jazz by the outstanding Prairie Jazz Trio. It’s at 6 p.m., October 3.
Proceeds from the evening go to Green Connections’ earth education programs at places like CommonWealth Urban Farms! Make your reservations now: https://greenconnectionsok.org/prairie-dinner/

Garden School Classes in August

Grill It!

Saturday, Aug. 14
11 am – noon
1016 NW 32nd St.
$10 per workshop,
$15 per couple/pair.
Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!

Nothin’ beats fresh veggies from the garden that have been tossed on the grill. Their deepest flavor is enhanced. Learn tips & tricks from grillmaster Steph as she demonstrates how to grill a variety of vegetables—and take part in sampling the results!

Instructor: Stephanie Jordan knows her way around the garden and the grill! Steph combines her experiences as a personal chef, farmer and educator to create healthy and delicious food based on locally grown produce.

Plant a Fall Salad Garden

Saturday, Aug. 28
11 am – noon
1016 NW 32nd St.
$10 per workshop,
$15 per couple/pair.
Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!

Fall is a wonderful time to garden in Oklahoma. Vegetables and gardeners alike love the cooler weather, and we (usually!) get rain. Greens and roots grow well at this time of year in Oklahoma and will provide you with delicious salads all through the fall. Knowing what and when to plant is critical to success. Lia will share her fall planting calendar along with tips for veggies best suited for fall & winter gardening.

Fall vegetable seedlings will be available for sale.

Instructor: Elia Woods is a co-founder and partner-farmer at CommonWealth Urban Farms. She has been gardening and farming for over 30 years, and loves to help home gardeners become more successful in growing their own food.

Come Bug Out at CommonWealth!

Saturday, August 21st at 11:30 am
1016 NW 32nd, OKC OK 73118

We had SO much fun looking at beneficial insects together at our Garden School program last month that we decided to make it a monthly event. Join us in the Food Forest at CommonWealth on the 3rd Saturday of each month when we peer into the world of tiny insects as they buzz, hop, crawl, and fly though the garden. We’ll have magnifying glasses and bug guides on hand to help identify these fascinating creatures. All ages are welcome.

Hey Partner Farmers: What’s happening on the farm?

Tesa Linville – Sabou

Harvesting marigolds, dahlias, zinnias, lion ear, snow on the mountain and amaranth. Selling at Date with Iris, Lily Grass and the Paseo Farmers Market. Starting seedlings in greenhouse for fall, and spring, plantings.

Jenn Mabry
The Giving Garden OKC

Currently in our little plot we are growing tomatoes, cucumbers, okra, peppers, malabar spinach, melons. We just pulled our bush beans and summer squash and have sown fava beans, carrots, beets and pole beans and even got in a row of potatoes, thanks to my forgetfulness that they were in my pantry. I think the hardest part of this season was that week-long rain; however, it really showed me where the soil needs love. We are looking forward to getting in more fall crops and to continue growing in the winter.

Elia Woods – Lia’s Garden at CommonWealth

It’s already time to think about fall gardens, and I’ve got broccoli & cauliflower seedlings that will be available for sale in mid-August for anyone wanting to plant them for fall. It can be a bit tricky to start transplants in the heat of the summer, when grasshoppers & cabbage worms are eager to devour any tender little seedlings, but each year I learn a few more tricks for making it work. I’m seeding lettuce, arugula, kale & spinach, green onion transplants now, too. Little Bear, our new kitten, loves playing in the garden while we work and keeps us thoroughly entertained!

Ryan Smith

This beautiful Summer heat helped produce an incredible bounty of full and delicious tomatoes and spicy peppers. Our home has never seen so much salsa and gazpacho! Looking forward to this August with everyday showing explosions of growth in the okra rows. I’ll start planning for the fall planting season over some fried okra in the coming weeks.

Everlyn, Sylvia, Veronica – Elgon Gardens

We are having a great experience with finding customers for our farm produce. We have established some locations including Paseo Farmers Market and this has played a big role in selling our produce there (many thanks). We’ll be planting some fall crops soon.

Meet our Partner Farmers

Jenn Mabry

Jenn Mabry was living the “go-go-go” corporate life, with its deadlines and high-pressure demands—until, after a year at a new job, working in a cubicle, she couldn’t take it anymore.

It was a risk for a single mom with a daughter, but she started classes in occupational therapy, hoping to do art therapy. When she took a horticulture class at OSUOKC, everything changed. “I didn’t take horticulture,” she says. “Horticulture took me.” As part of her learning, she took an internship at CommonWealth Urban Farm. That was 7 years ago. Since then, she’s been growing food and building community around growing food—primarily, until last fall, at the garden at Chesapeake Oil. TLC Nurseries paid her salary to oversee the Chesapeake garden. There, she and a growing cadre of volunteers grew vegetables for the OKC food pantry and, when the production of veggies increased, for the Homeless Alliance as well.

“It was a full block garden,” she says. “I couldn’t do it myself. I let friends know through Facebook that I needed help.”

As volunteer numbers grew, as production increased, so did the sense of community. Volunteers wanted to learn more, so Jenn developed classes. They put in a Monarch Way Station and learned about pollinators and how insects work together.

“They became proud of what they were doing in the garden,” says Jenn. “They’d bring family and friends and show them the row they were tending.”

Girl Scout troops volunteered. “It’s important for children to learn where food comes from,” says Jenn. “They are apt to try it if they’ve grown it.”

Potlucks in the garden gave Jenn a chance to introduce new foods, like carrot top pesto.

Working in the garden, with a variety of people as well as plants, “means something” to people, says Jenn. Providing food for people experiencing homelessness, including in one OKC public school, has come to mean a great deal to Jenn. “One in four children in public schools in the U.S. are food insecure,” she says. “Their only meal is at school.”

“I wanted to do something to help.” But then Chesapeake closed its campus in Oklahoma City, including the garden. So last fall Jenn became a partner-farmer at CommonWealth.

“CommonWealth saved my life,” she said. “I needed space to continue to grow food for the Homeless Alliance. Fresh food is hard for them to get.”

Now, every Saturday the dedicated volunteers who garden with Jenn come to CommonWealth to continue their work together. “It’s great being here; being in community with like-minded individuals.” She and her team are one of five partner-farmer teams at CommonWealth.

Jenn is establishing a not-for-profit organization to continue her work growing food. She hopes to establish gardens around Oklahoma City and has secured the next garden location—as well as plenty of work for her community of volunteers. “It’s covered in Bermuda grass, so we’ll have to dig it and plant cover crops this coming fall.”

While developing more garden projects and education through her organization, Jenn also hopes to continue to grow food at CommonWealth—for her own well-being. “I want that to be my own garden. I want to grow niche crops for chefs. I love being outside; it’s therapeutic.”

Jenn, growing up in Oklahoma City, was never interested or ever helped in her parents’ garden. Her time is now.

Devoted Community: Co-founder Lia Woods and longest-serving CW volunteer Debbie Baker in the summer rain last Saturday morning during CommonWork.

“As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.”― Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

Garden School Classes in July

Good Bugs: A Walking Tour of Beneficial Insects in the Garden

Saturday, July 10th, 11 am – noon
1016 NW 32nd St.
$10 per workshop, $15 per couple/pair. Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!

Insects provide many beneficial services in our landscape, including pollination, soil building, and pest control. Plus, they are fascinating! Join us as we go on a bug hunt, and learn how to spot particular insects, learn local beneficial insects, and what plants can be grown to attract more beneficial insects.

Instructor: Kat Gant runs the school garden support program of OKC Beautiful, OKC Harvest. Kat has 20 years of experience within sustainable horticulture, including community gardening, farming, advocacy and teaching. Before joining OKC Beautiful, Kat managed a certified organic farm in OKC and developed the Employee Garden at Chesapeake Energy.

Growing Microgreens at Home

Saturday, July 17, 11 am – noon

1016 NW 32nd St.
$10 per workshop, $15 per couple/pair. Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!

There is a $5 materials fee for this class.

Grow your own super-nutrient-dense microgreens at home. This will be a hands-on class so come ready to get dirty! All materials provided, but bring a small spray bottle if you have one. Additional supplies will be available for purchase.

Instructor: Joshua Guess, founder of Rooted Farm, has been growing microgreens for 10+ years and is passionate about connecting people with clean, nutrient-dense foods.

Fungus & Microbes & Rot, Oh My! Recipes for Successful Composting

Saturday July 24, 11 am – noon
1016 NW 32nd St.
$10 per workshop, $15 per couple/pair. Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!

Do you want to learn how to make that beautiful, rich, black substance we call “gardener’s gold”? David and Allen have been building compost piles for many years, and have a profound appreciation for rot! David will show participants the composting operation at CommonWealth, and the elements that make it a success. Allen will demonstrate different methods for building a successful home compost pile.

Instructor: David Braden, compost master and co-founder of CommonWealth Urban Farms
Allen Parleir, coordinator of Closer To Earth and co-founder of CommonWealth Urban Farms

Hey Partner Farmers: What’s happening on the farm?

Jenn Mabry – The Giving Garden OKC

The Giving Garden OKC is busy transforming our plot to feed our community. We donate our produce to the Homeless Alliance and have weekly, educational volunteer days. We are attempting to grow as much as we can, as fast as we can so that we can keep the donations consistent. Fall crops are our next project and transplants have already been started! We’ll be building up the soil in the meantime.

Elia Wood – Lia’s Garden at CommonWealth

I had a wonderful spring season growing and selling vegetable, herb & native pollinator seedlings. BIG thanks to all my customers—I am so grateful to get to do what I love! Now it’s time to start planting broccoli, cauliflower & other fall transplants. (Already?? Yep!) I was especially impressed this year with how many people are recognizing the importance of native plants in bringing back a functioning ecosystem. Doug Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home has been tremendously influential for me, and I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about our future.

Tesa Linville – Sabou

Harvesting loads and loads of cut flowers and edible flowers, with many thanks for John Stanley, a dedicated volunteer. The new colors of sunflowers are making their appearance. In addition to the traditional yellow, there are pale yellow ones, and soon a white one! Fighting the cucumber beetles and looking forward to succession plantings.

Everlyn, Sylvia, Veronica – Elgon Gardens

Everlyn, Sylvia and Veronica have lots of healthy high-yielding vegetables growing. In the 14 rows, you’ll see over 200 tomato plants supported by cattle panels. We are now looking for markets for cherry tomatoes which are being harvested, and soon to be ready for harvest: slicing and cooking tomatoes. We also have Shishito peppers, edible African nightshade leaves, amaranth, and Malabar spinach ready for harvest. Can’t wait for sweet potatoes later in the season.

All this great harvest is thanks to the fertile soil, worm cast manure (thank you so much for the hands and time put in by wonderful volunteers), and the working togetherness of the CommonWealth partner-farmers. The resources (both human and asset) provided by CommonWealth are very much appreciated.

Ryan Smith
Spring was the time for flowers! Healthy rows of poppies and larkspur saw lots of pollinators stopping by daily to check-in. Now that the heat has arrived the tomatoes are producing beautiful fruits and the row of okra is starting to take off. Coming into this relatively fresh there’s been a lot to learn. Working with GREAT soil coupled with wonderful tips from my fellow partner farmers has made all the difference. Advice I received early in the season: When removing larger ‘suckers’ from your tomato plants, remove then simply plug them straight down in the ground and you get more plants:)

Meet our Partner Farmers: Elgon Gardens

The dream to grow and eat food that has been grown and tastes naturally has been in Everlyn’s mind and in 2020, Everlyn started to grow vegetables at her home in Edmond. While cultivating the crops, Everlyn realized that her clay garden soil needed amending because despite the best she had done, her vegetables did not produce well. During the 2021 spring planting season, Everlyn’s daughter Sylvia started to search for a place to get compost manure.

She found Commonwealth Urban Farms which had gardening school and volunteering opportunities during that weekend. So Everlyn and her daughters (Sylvia and Veronica) went to buy worm cast manure as well as to attend garden school and to volunteer at Commonwealth Urban Farms. This is when they learned of the partner-farmer opportunity at Commonwealth, and they placed in their application. Having been accepted as a partner-farmer and after working on this wonderfully kept fertile Commonwealth Farm, Everlyn named her garden Elgon Gardens, which reminds her of the non-clay soil she is used to while growing up on the slopes of Mount Elgon in Kenya.

Everlyn decided to do farming so her family can “eat fresh food straight from the garden because fresh vegetables taste really good.” She loves and has enjoyed growing food since she was a little girl. Her daughters come in handy to help their mother Everlyn who understands and speaks Swahili better than English. Veronica and Sylvia love to help their mother because they share the same ideas on organic produce and because they grew up in the farm too. The three brainstorm their ideas and put their hands to work. But farming in her Edmond Garden is “challenging because they need to learn about what grows best in Oklahoma and the seasons for planting, how to amend soil, when and how to irrigate plants.”

Here at Commonwealth farm, Elgon Gardens is farming 14 rows, where they have planted 200 tomato plants, some sweet potatoes, shishito peppers, cucumbers, bulb onions and Malabar spinach. Their plantings are growing with great vigor (thanks to CW compost, fertile soil, other partner-farmers for sharing their knowledge and mainly to the volunteers for all they do.) Now they are developing markets for their vegetables.

While at CommonWealth, the three say they have already learned a great deal in this short period they have been here. These include how to improve garden soil, how to use drip irrigation and how to use garden fabric, just to mention a few. They also love being at CommonWealth because the other CommonWealth partner-farmers share their knowledge, ideas, and resources unselfishly and that makes CommonWealth a such a wonderful place and a great family to be associated with.

The Robin family at CW’s hoop house lot this week. Thanks to Pat Velte for the photo.

This Morning

This morning the redbirds’ eggs
have hatched and already the chicks
are chirping for food. They don’t
know where it’s coming from, they
just keep souting, “More! More!”
As to anything else, they haven’t
had a single thought. Their eyes
haven’t yet opened, they know nothing
about the sky that’s waiting. Or
the thousands, the millions of trees.
They don’t even know they have wings.

And just like that, like a simple
neighborhood event, a miracle is
taking place.
—Mary Oliver

Partner Farmers 2021

Tesa Linville, Lia Woods, Sylvia Yego, Ryan Smith, Veronica Yego (Not pictured, Jenn Mabry)

The Partner-Farmer program at CommonWealth serves as a resource for up and coming farmers who have the desire and initial skills to start their own farm business, but lack access to land and a support network. Access to land can be a huge barrier to overcome for aspiring urban farmers, particularly in urban settings where land is often prohibitively expensive or perhaps only made available for growing on a temporary basis (often not even long enough to get it properly amended in order to viably grow anything). CommonWealth serves as a bridge, providing access to land for aspiring farmers.

Confab in the garden with Sylvia, Mary King, Veronica and Lia.

Through this program Partner-Farmers gain access to reclaimed urban land that has been lovingly cultivated, amended, and maintained by CommonWealth using sustainable practices over the past 10+ years. Partner-Farmer access to this land is free. In addition to the land, CommonWealth provides other tangible resources, such as free compost for fertilization, and intangible resources, including access to our community and volunteers.

With this program, CommonWealth seeks to broaden and strengthen access to locally-grown food and local food security, by “growing” local farmers. By supporting new farmers in Oklahoma City and aiding in the creation of new farm businesses, this program has the potential to positively affect the OKC area for many years to come. More farmers means more choices, more businesses, more jobs, greater food security, greater access city- and state-wide to locally grown food.—Mary King

Meet Mary

When Mary King started volunteering at CommonWealth, one of her tasks was to wash the red crates used to bring in the harvest. Then she became the bookkeeper and now she is CommonWealth program administrator as well. She’s the point

person for people inquiring about CommonWealth, answering all kinds of questions, explaining how they can connect and referring people to team members.

Mary also coordinates the Partner Farmer program which involves the annual

recruitment of people interested in growing their farming skills and making sure it’s a good fit for all, then coordinating and communicating with farmers as they get to work raising their crops in the CW farm fields.

“I look at what Lia and CommonWealth has built,” says Mary. “I’ve watched it, been a part of it on and off. It’s been a slow build and I’ve seen how it has been able to adapt and change to the needs of the people involved and the community and Oklahoma City in general. It’s a great resource and I love to see it and be part of it.

“People come and say ‘I’m a new gardener and I don’t know what to do. Help!’ I love that CW has ways to help people who are brand new and ways to help people spring-boarding into farming. It’s an exciting time for this organization. CW is well-positioned to help Oklahoma City grow in a sustainable sense.

“We are living in interesting times. I think in the last year people have come to value greater access to local food. I think people felt the precariousness of the international food chain; they never imagined seeing empty shelves in the grocery store. It was a wake-up call. “Lia and CW have spent decades laying the foundation, plugging away. CW has solidity to it as a community resource. You can’t just whip that up. And there’s new energy coming in. It’s exciting to see more and more people every day wanting to support this vision.

“Even as CW has moved from a farm business to a farm resource, it’s still serving its core mission–to develop community around growing food. Even more so!”

The CommonWealth team is SO happy Mary started washing out those red crates! Capable to the core and living the vision, she is a perfect fit.

Partner Farmer Tesa

A visit to Tesa Linville is a visit to a growing urban farm. Flowering boysenberry bushes make their way over a trellis. A new fence around the garden protects tender veggies from the chickens. Spring onions grow straight and tall in a raised bed. Rows of clumps of colorful edible flowers are over there on the left.

Chickens rush out of their house when Tesa opens the door. She checks on growing chicks in a separate box and reaches under brown hens to fetch tiny chicks still being kept warm, alongside unhatched eggs. (And chases down adventurous one who has escaped.) The newest addition to Tesa’s farm is a greenhouse where tray after tray after tray of seedlings are growing strong on top of the container of compost that heats the space. In her second year as a CommonWealth Partner Farmer, Tesa’s farm is a testament to the program, which supports farmers as they expand their operation.

Not only does she raise food and flowers at home, she tends rows of flowers in the CommonWealth hoop house and flower field.

Growth is not all about space, of course. It most has to do with learning, and Tesa says she has

learned a great deal in the last year. She’s learning which flowers grow best in the hoop house and which do better, for various reasons, in the field. (Some flowers get stronger stems in the Oklahoma spring winds and some flowers droop weary heads.) She is learning how to grow tall, straight-stemmed flowers and how to harvest and get them to florist shops fresh out of the field.

Tesa names three great advantages of farming as a partner farmer at CommonWealth as opposed to going it alone: “Lia has been a big help, egging me on for one thing. And the community knowledge about plants and the support while I’m figuring things out…I wouldn’t have gotten geared up nearly as soon. Lia has helped me too walking through how to get clients.”

Soil is another big advantage. CommonWealth’s composting operation and sustainable gardening practices over 12 years have created a fertile, healthy growing environment.

“Soil is a big one,” says Tesa. “CommonWealth soil is already prepared. It will take me awhile to build it at my house.” Tesa’s flower farming is a boon to the Oklahoma City community. She sells flowers, including a limited number of arrangements and bouquets, through the Paseo Farmers Market. Her largest clientele is to local florists, who are challenged to find locally-grown flowers. Locally-grown flowers are fresher for customers and better for the environment than trucking them hundreds of miles. It is thrilling to watch Tesa succeed.

Tesa’s new compost-heated greenhouse.

Planting the Path for Monarchs

Saturday, May 1
11 am – noon
1016 NW 32nd St.
$10 per workshop, $15 per couple/pair
Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!

The monarch butterfly populations have plummeted at an alarming rate and Oklahoma is critical to their survival. Our great state is centrally located in their migration flyway. Now is the time (before it’s too late) for us Okies to get our hands dirty and help the monarchs! Learn what you can do in your garden and beyond to help save the monarchs! We’ll tour CommonWealth’s own pollinator gardens and each participant will receive a packet of free pollinator seed mix.
Instructor: Kevin Mink, Oklahoma County Conservation District.

Pollinator seedlings will also be available for sale.

COMING UP NEXT:
HANDS-ON FOOD FOREST PLANTING EVENT
Saturday. May 22
11 a.m.
1016 NW 32nd St.

A permaculture food forest is a low maintenance, sustainable and productive garden of trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables, based on the natural systems found in forests.

We began planting a food forest at CommonWealth several years ago, and are continuing to expand and develop it. Elia will start with an introduction to Food Forest design, then we’ll roll up our sleeves and plant the next round of trees, berries and other perennials.

Instructor: Elia Woods is a co-founder and partner-farmer at CommonWealth Urban Farms

PLEASE NOTE
Covid-19 Consideration: in order to maintain a high level of safety, please be prepared to wear a mask and keep a 6-foot distance from others unless you have received complete vaccination.

See the full list of classes at the education tab on our website (subject to change.)Patreon Member Discount
You can sign up to be a CommonWealth patron at the level of $10 a month and up and receive discounted Garden School admission. Learn more here: https://www.patreon.com/commonwealthurbanfarms

2021 is Springing

All has not been quiet at CommonWealth Urban Farms even in the midst of a pandemic. Food Forest has been in the dedicated hands of volunteers who come each week to tidy the circles and clear away debris. Green rows of greens in the beautiful, moist air of the Hoop House have invited cut-and-come-again all winter. The compost-heated greenhouse has been a wonder to us all: On that minus-12-degree night the delicate seedlings atop the compost pile enjoyed a 47-degree bed! A new germination chamber urges seeds into life surely and quickly! Composting volunteers cheerfully do their amazing work every single week. Cover crops on the farm are nourishing the soil. Partner-farmers are gearing up for a new season. And we have scheduled a humdinger of a Garden School season. Check it out below!

Meet some of our incredible team members and see what all they do
on our urban farm!

First Garden School Class of 2021

March 13: How to Grow a Vegetable Garden Even if You’ve Never Planted a Seed in Your Life
11am to noon
1016 NW 32nd St.
$10 per workshop, $15 per couple/pair, unless otherwise noted. Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!
(If this class gets rained out, we will offer it March 20.
Keep an eye on our fb page for last-minute info:
https://www.facebook.com/Commonwealthurbanfarms)

It’s actually pretty simple! Elia will cover the basics—soil, water, seed—that guarantee your first garden will be a delicious success. Participants will help plant a container garden that can be scaled up or down, and is suitable for backyards, front yards, decks, or patios. Each person will also have the chance to start several pots of seeds to take home. Here’s to a successful first garden!

Instructor: Elia Woods is a co-founder and partner-farmer at CommonWealth Urban Farms. She has been gardening and farming for over 30 years, and loves introducing beginners to the delights of growing food.
Veggie seedlings will be available for sale.

PLEASE NOTE
Covid-19 Consideration: in order to maintain a high level of safety, please be prepared to wear a mask and keep a 6-foot distance from others. We ask that you forego attendance if you are feeling sick or have a raised temperature.

Coming Next:

March 27: Success with Seeds: Tips & Tricks for Starting Transplants Inside

11 a.m. to noon
1016 NW 32nd St.
$10 per workshop, $15 per couple/pair, unless otherwise noted. Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!

Get a head start on the growing season by starting seeds inside! We’ll show you several simple at-home set-ups for starting seedlings, and walk through the basics of growing seeds into healthy, vigorous transplants. If you’ve been dogged by poor germination or spindly seedlings, we have answers at hand! We’ll also demonstrate how to take cuttings and root them, a simple method for propagating herbs & many other plants. This is a hands-on class; each person will choose from a selection of vegetable or flower seeds as well as herb cuttings to plant & take home.

Instructor: Elia Woods is a co-founder and partner-farmer at CommonWealth Urban Farms. Nothing makes her happier than planting seeds and starting baby seedlings.

Partner-Farmer Opportunity

CommonWealth has space available for one or two more partner-farmers for the 2021 growing season! If you are interested, contact us asap. We have 2500 square feet of cultivated land available for persons with farming experience to utilize to grow crops! If you have farming experience and an interest in starting a farm business, but lack access to land, this would be the ideal opportunity for you. These beds have been lovingly cultivated, amended, and maintained using sustainable practices over the past 10-plus years.

Partner-Farmers have access to land and infrastructure for free. The only monetary obligation is a minimal monthly charge to cover water/utility access for the space. Partner-Farmers must agree to use only organic, sustainable practices. Preference given to BIPOC and young farmers. For more information, please contact info@commonwealthurbanfarms.com or call Mary at 405-795-2044.

Our neighborhood farmer’s market, The Paseo Farmers Market, (where our partner-farmers make their food and plants available) has moved its operation into a permanent location and extended its hours! Just across the street from this summer’s pickup spot, the new location is at 3020 N. Walker (just south, next door, to The Mayan.) Ordering is online and pickup is Saturday, Sunday, Monday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. AND, plans are in the works to open an in-person retail store, Paseo Food Cooperative.

It’s very exciting to have this great outlet and resource in our community, for growers and eaters alike! Check out all the possibilities at paseofarmersmarket.com.

2020! The Year of All-Things-Garden

Even with all that has happened, 2020 has been a productive and fertile time for us. A bit more stress than usual, for sure! Like everybody, we’ve had to make some quick turns to adjust to new circumstances, but we have managed to carry on and actually completed new projects.

One of the exciting turn-of-events is that people became interested in all-things-garden, returning to or learning for the first time how to grow some of their own food. We are glad to help in that process!

New Rain Garden and Expanded Pollinator Habitat

Andrew, our pollinator intern this spring, helped dig a rain garden in front of our flower lot, and we filled it with native pollinator plants. The basins in the rain garden slow down and catch run-off from the streets, roofs and yards, so that it can slowly soak into the ground. As the plants in our rain garden mature, they will help filter contaminates in the water, so that the excess water that does pass through the rain garden is cleaner by the time it reaches the storm sewers and eventually our creeks and rivers.

Brand-new botanical signage gives passers-by an introduction to the benefits of native plants and rain gardens, and how a rain garden actually works, as well as individual plant identification.

We also added several new strips of pollinator plants around the edges of the farm.

Thanks go out to all the volunteers who helped with this project, and to the Oklahoma County Conservation District & NRCS for funding it!

Compost as a Heat Source
Many of us have built compost piles as a way to make valuable “gardeners’ gold” to add fertility to our gardens. But did you know that compost piles also create heat as the materials decompose, and that you can “harvest” that heat to extend your growing season? We use compost to heat our greenhouse, as well as to create “hot beds” under low tunnels to keep our seedlings warm in early spring.
This is an old, well-proven method—we didn’t invent it!—that fell into disuse as we became more dependent on fossil fuels. But it’s a simple, ecological and inexpensive technique worth reviving.

Thanks to a USDA grant through the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food & Forestry, we were able to offer two workshops on this method earlier this fall and will offer two more in the spring. Plus we’re working on a professional video and written guide to be available online for free.

Garden Schools & Saturday Volunteer Events

We started the spring with more people than ever attending our Garden School classes and Saturday morning volunteer events. Then the pandemic hit! We filled in with online videos and FB Live events (not the same—I know!) and by late summer were able to offer classes again outside and socially distanced.

We sure do miss the big, social, everybody-working-together times, and we miss seeing so many of YOU! Sooner or later, it will be safe for us to all be together again. In the meantime, we’re putting together a tantalizing slate of Garden School classes for 2021—more on that soon 

Special thanks to our core group of dedicated volunteers who keep showing up, and attending to the essentials.

CommonWealth as an Incubator Farm

This was our first year to try out a new model as an incubator farm. CommonWealth provided land and infrastructure to four partner-farmers to develop their own enterprises growing and selling vegetables, flowers and herbs. (In photo, from left: Lia Woods, Jacob Sanders, Megan Sanders, Tesa Linville.)

Tesa grew cut flowers and edibles: “The knowledge and the resources that CW has to offer have been wonderful. I don’t think I would have had the confidence or the drive to have done it otherwise. I will be at CW next year and I can’t wait.”

Megan grew cut flowers: “What was most helpful about being a CW partner-farmer? Land access! And, I’ve learned some things for next year.”

Jacob grew vegetables: “Most helpful at CommonWealth was land access that was already a farm. Also, sharing materials was great! I will take with me the fellowship and a better understanding of my limitations, and how to overcome them.”

Lia grew seedlings and vegetables: “I was delighted to see how much entrepreneurial energy and creativity arose from each of us partner-farmers being completely in charge of our own operations. And I loved being able to talk shop and glean new ideas from my co-farmers.”

We have five partner-farmers lined up for 2021; we’ll introduce them to you in the January newsletter!

From our co-founder, Lia

Ten years ago this month, a small group of us met with the seed of an idea that eventually sprouted into CommonWealth. Ten years! I thought we had big ideas then, but what grew from that seed is far more than I ever dreamed.

Fields of vegetables and flowers, migrating monarchs congregating on a patch of zinnias, classes on native bees or growing mushrooms, compost piles filled with red wriggler worms and tended by proud volunteers – none of that existed here when we began. We find stray people walking down the block, saying “I had no idea this was happening in my city!”

Ten years ago, I was a looking for a few good people with whom I could start a teaching farm. Today, I am surrounded by an astonishing, diverse, eccentric community of people who are passionately dedicated to growing and learning and renewing our world. Lucky me. Lucky us!

Consider an end-of-the-year gift to CommonWealth Urban Farms

We aim to be a community-supported project, and are grateful for all volunteer labor and financial donations.

Please consider a single donation or becoming a continuing supporter through our Patreon program.

To make a one-time donation, click on the “Donate” button on the bottom of our site, or mail a check to CommonWealth Urban Farms, at 1013 NW 32nd St., Oklahoma City, OK 73118.

Garden School: Herbal Balms

October 10
Note: this is a 2-hour class, fee is $15
10 am to noon
1016 NW 32nd St.

Yatar combines herbs from his garden, beeswax from his hives, olive oil and essential oils to formulate balms with specific beneficial qualities. Yatar will demonstrate how he makes his herbal beeswax healing balms, as well as the bamboo containers that he creates to hold his balms. With Yatar’s guidance, each participant will make their own bamboo container, and a customized herbal balm to fill it.

Instructor: Yatar Layah, gardener and founder of It’s the Balm.

See the full list of classes at the education tab on our website (subject to change.)

Cover Crop Seed Sale

Cover Crop Seed Available Now!
Early October is the perfect time to plant cover crops to improve the health of your soil. Choose a small packet for $2 (covers 100 sq. ft.) or large for $5 (covers 500 sq. ft.)
Our mixes include winter rye, Austrian winter peas, and crimson clover, as well as daikon radish & mustard (opt.)
Cover crops are a simple, inexpensive and highly effective way to improve the quality of your soil.

Available for purchase during our seedling sale on Saturdays, 10 am to 2 pm, or Thursdays 4-6 pm.

Look at the Food Forest!

My, how it grows……and feeds many! Catch a glimpse of the hummingbird video (below.)

Hummingbird feasts in the food forest.

Bio Swale/Pollinator/Rain Garden

We can imagine a time when a block of Oklahoma City residents come together and create rain gardens in the strip between the curb on the sidewalk in front of every house on their street. They wouldn’t have to be as elaborate as the one we made at CommonWealth, but they would slow the water rushing down the street during a rain enough for some of it to sink into the ground and be filtered more than it is now when it reaches the city’s water treatment plant. The shallow gardens would be filled with pollinator plants to help filter the water and feed bees and butterflies.

We’ve learned a lot in the process of creating the rain and pollinator garden at CommonWealth. It’s a beauty and it’s doing its job well. We were fortunate to get funding for the project from the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Oklahoma County Conservation District. Many thanks to Jenna Moore for grant assistance, Kevin Mink of the OCCD for extensive help with design and implementation, intern Andrew Johnson, all the volunteers, including Ryan Smith, and many thanks to Lia, for directing the project.

Come check it out!

What to do with your Tomatoes

In June/July watch how red arrives
Make gazpacho
Dice into a San Marino salad bowl
BLT with a local IPA
Simmer a pasta sauce
Carry the cores to the compost heap
Charcoal draw them on the vine
Tell how we used to think them
nightshade, poison, devil’s fruit
Upon ripening some of us are ogled,
cat-called hot tomatoes
Shoo the Grackles
Slice with care your perfect Early Girl.

—Jane Taylor

Garden School

July 11: Eye of the Lens: Connecting in Nature
9 to 11 am
Note: this is a 2-hour class
$10 per workshop, $15 per couple/pair, unless otherwise noted. Or volunteer on a Saturday morning, and get in free!

When we see something wonderful in nature, we often want to hold on to it. And there begins a creative process of trying to express through a photograph what it was we felt when we experienced this event in the natural world. At the same time, focusing that experience through a camera lens, we see more deeply, more intimately the very thing we are experiencing, paying attention to, absorbed in. Photography does more than capture a moment in nature, it helps us know better our life in nature.

Bring a camera, if you’d like, or plan to use the camera on your cell phone.

Instructor: Pat Hoerth, an amateur photographer, is a child of the Oklahoma prairie, who enjoys the natural world in the CommonWealth Urban Farm community where she lives.

Coming Up Next:
July 25: Fungus & Microbes & Rot, Oh My! Recipes for Successful Composting
11 am to noon

Optional: $10 fee to make your own compost sifter from 12 to 12:30 pm

Bonus! Participants can stay afterwards and make a compost sifter, sized to sit on top of a wheelbarrow – a truly useful tool for home gardens. $10 fee covers all supplies, including lumber and hardware cloth. Email us ahead of time to reserve your spot for making the sifter, so we know how many supplies to bring.

Instructors: David Braden, compost master and co-founder of CommonWealth Urban Farms.
Allen Parleir, coordinator of Closer To Earth and co-founder of CommonWealth Urban Farms.

See the full list of classes at the education tab on our website (subject to change.)
Patreon
You can sign up to be a CommonWealth patron at the level of $10 a month and up and receive discounted Garden School admission. Learn more here: https://www.patreon.com/commonwealthurbanfarms

Partner-Farmer Mini-Reports: What are they up to this week?

Tesa at CommonWealth Urban Farms
Growing edible flowers, edible herbs, cut flowers
Selling through Sabou at Paseo Farmer’s Market

“Much is blooming now! Trying to keep it all alive. Hollyhocks (great on top of cakes,) Spilanthes (“toothache plant.”) My favorite flower blooming right now is the Butterly Pea. Also, the Tuberose Begonia are really pretty and have an amazing citrus flavor. I’m making soaps using herbs and flowers and making herbal vinegars. I’m going to experiment with some flower crafts: a tabletop with flowers covered in resin. We’ll see!”

Megan—Circleculture Farms at CommonWealth
Growing specialty cut flowers. Also selling through Paseo Farmer’s Market.

“I’m filling orders for DIY wedding flower buckets these days for brides who have shifted their wedding plans from large events to smaller, intimate and COVID-19 safe celebrations. Trying to keep up with weeds and cutting flowers! Also made my first dried flower wreath of the season and will open up orders for those soon. Purchase information can be found on our Instagram (@circleculturefarm) or Facebook page (Circleculture Farm).”

Jacob—Circleculture Farms at CommonWealth.
Growing market vegetables, salad mixes, mushrooms.
Also selling through Paseo Farmer’s Market.

“Been harvesting the last of the carrots and beets and cleaned out the lean-to with Lia. Had a good garlic crop and seed crops are well on their way to harvest time.”

Lia’s Garden at CommonWealth Urban Farms
Growing vegetable, flower, herb and pollinator seedlings. Managing food forest, offering educational programing.
Also selling through Paseo Farmer’s Market.

“A big huge thanks to all of you who bought seedlings from me this season! I had a very busy & successful season, and I’m so grateful for all your support and positive feedback. I’ll be selling seedlings all summer. Next week, I’ll start seeding broccoli and cauliflower to sell as transplants in August, followed by a variety of other fall veggies & flowers. I also put in a dozen rows of veggies to harvest over the summer for The Red Cup and the Paseo Farmers Market. But this week I’m taking three days off to go camping! My fb page and websiteI—If you could tell your friends, and “like” us on fb, I’d sure appreciate it! ”

Meet a Friend of CommonWealth

Kevin Mink

When the rain came in mid-June, it was a sure bet that you could find Kevin Mink at CommonWealth Urban Farm, out in front of the flower lot. Kevin had been working with pollinator garden intern Andrew Johnson, Lia and volunteers to build the bioswale that would capture water that flows down 32^nd street during a rain.

Water is diverted off the street into a holding ditch where it waters the roots of pollinator plants on either side, before slowly leaving the swale, some of the grimy oils filtered out. Sure enough, on that rainy day, they were all three there, in the pouring rain, soaked. You can watch Kevin’s video below.

Kevin is an urban soil health specialist for the Oklahoma County Conservation District. He moved to Oklahoma City a year ago after his wife Mikaela was matched to her obgyn residency at OU. Kevin was working for Trees Atlanta in Georgia coordinating full spectrum restoration projects. “Taking a field of kudzu and transforming it into an ecosystem,” he said. “It’s cool to watch; the project never really stops.”

Growing up in northeast Pennsylvania, Kevin spent a lot of time in nature, through the Boy Scouts. “That put me on a path,” he says. At Drexel University, he studied engineering but soon learned he didn’t like computer programming and switched his major to biology and transferred to Vanderbilt. A plant biology teacher inspired him. “She was a funny, quirky plant person,” he says. “She saw my eye for the natural world. I was her teaching assistant for awhile.”

Kevin’s first research project was observing the activity patterns of chameleons in Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. “I’d go out at night, find a chameleon on a branch and go back the next morning and watch it all day.”

As an urban soil health specialist, he is an educator and problem-solver. “There is so much around soil. For instance, I’m talking with people about protecting water resources, growing native plants.” This week he consulted with a community member where a lake is having algae issues. “I asked what they do to their lawns. Do they garden? I was able to help them see connections between fertilizer applications and algae in the lake. I’m a dot-connector.”

“It’s an uphill battle,” says Kevin. “It’s easy when people are interested and open. There are people who are hard to reach. My education and background don’t matter; I can’t convince some people and it’s disturbing. But it’s exciting when I connect with someone who sees something new.”

Studying for his master’s in landscape architecture at the University of Oklahoma, Kevin’s focus when he took the job with the County conservation office, was on pollinator habitat. He lives near CommonWealth and had taken a tour of the farm. When he learned that CommonWealth wanted to expand its pollinator gardens and that there was an NRCS grant to do just that, he knew he had found a fitting partner. “It was a perfect match,” he says. “The project is still in progress. And we’ll watch it next spring. To see your work in action is the greatest reward.”

Another dream is to pursue the possibility of transforming college campuses into urban food systems. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. A university is a microcosm of society. I’d like the opportunity to integrate a food system into a university campus.”

Kevin and Mikeala don’t expect to stay in Oklahoma. Their families are on the East and West Coasts. But for now, we are extremely glad to be working and learning from Kevin. If CommonWealth’s experiment with the bioswale and pollinator garden pan out, Kevin wants to encourage more rain gardens in Oklahoma City. Nothing would please us more!

Pollinator/Rain Garden

Garden School 2022!

2022 Partner Farmers

Gosh, that was heartwarming! Harvest Potluck in the Garden

The Great Pumpkin Smash

And this very special free class: Using Compost as Heat Source for Growing Seedlings

Hey Partner Farmers: What’s happening on the farm?

Our Food Forest is Growing!

CommonWealth’s Amazing New Resource

Using Compost as a Heat Source for Growing Seedlings on Hot Beds and in Greenhouses

Garden School Classes in September

Let’s Bug Out at CommonWealth

Hey Partner Farmers: What’s happening on the farm?

Meet our Partner Farmers

Join us at the Prairie Dinner

Garden School Classes in August

Come Bug Out at CommonWealth!

Hey Partner Farmers: What’s happening on the farm?

Meet our Partner Farmers

Garden School Classes in July

Hey Partner Farmers: What’s happening on the farm?

Meet our Partner Farmers: Elgon Gardens

Partner Farmers 2021

Meet Mary

Partner Farmer Tesa

Planting the Path for Monarchs

2021 is Springing

First Garden School Class of 2021

Partner-Farmer Opportunity

2020! The Year of All-Things-Garden

Consider an end-of-the-year gift to CommonWealth Urban Farms

Garden School: Herbal Balms

Cover Crop Seed Sale

Bio Swale/Pollinator/Rain Garden

Garden School

Partner-Farmer Mini-Reports: What are they up to this week?

Meet a Friend of CommonWealth

Friends of CommonWealth

Become a Patron

Support CommonWealth

CommonWealth Urban Farms