We are now living in the bizarro timeline and food is just going to get more expensive, so all of us should be thinking about brushing up our gardening know-how. I started gardening in 2020 and I am still an amateur, but I can tell you a lot about how to start and nurture a […]
Gardening
Posted inCommunity/News
This 159-year-old bonsai is living its best life at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden
There are, of course, no bonsai seeds — only bonsai trees. Most tree species can be “trained” to become bonsai through a sophisticated, often obsessive process of cutting, potting, pruning, wiring and styling a plant into a miniature, meticulously sculpted version of itself. The art form is rooted in centuries of Japanese and Chinese tradition, […]
Posted inCommunity/News
‘Plant. Grow. Fly.’ program marks 10 years of crafting pollinator-friendly garden recipes for Iowans
Ten years ago, the monarch butterfly was in serious trouble. Its numbers had cratered to the lowest level researchers had seen since the current monarch population monitoring programs began in the mid-1990s. Although the monarch has rebounded from that low point enough for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to upgrade its status […]
Posted inCentral Iowa
Forced to downsize, Sweet Tooth Farm focuses on self-care: ‘We can come back stronger’
In the summer of 2021, Monika Owczarski was informed by the City of Des Moines that the land she was leasing for her urban farm, Sweet Tooth Farm, would no longer be rented to her. Owczarski was devastated. On these two plots of land, she had been able to grow a little over an acre […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Take a walk among the dinosaurs in ‘that one Des Moines garden’ this July
After a four-year hiatus, the Polk County Master Gardeners’ Garden Tour is back, highlighting 11 exceptional gardeners and garden enthusiasts across the county, including Urbandale, Clive, Des Moines and Ankeny. The tour is part of Iowa State University Extension and Outreach in Polk County. One stop on the tour — enticingly dubbed “That One Des […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Refugee-led nonprofit Tapestry Farms fights Quad Cities food deserts with gardens
Half of Iowa’s grocery stores closed in the last quarter of the 20th century, according to the Iowa Department of Public Health. Today, roughly 40 percent of Iowans live a half mile or more from the nearest source of fresh fruits and vegetables—a minor inconvenience for folks with ready access to transportation, but devastating to […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Garden so good it deserves an audience? Sign up for Project GREEN’s newly expanded Open Gardens Weekend
Like the gardens it highlights, Project GREEN’s Open Gardens Weekend has gone through cycles of getting established, lying fallow and then growing. The first Open Gardens Weekend in 2019 was a success with more than 600 people visiting 30-plus gardens in Iowa City, according to event coordinator Beth Cody. In 2020, the event was canceled […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Gaia’s Peace Garden blooms while preparing to be sold
Just south of Interstate 80 and past the burgeoning home construction, a whimsical garden flourishes in the middle of suburbia. Here at 2066 Bristol Drive grows Gaia’s Peace Garden, a botanical sanctuary recognized by the United Plant Savers and wildlife habitat certified by the National Wildlife Federation.
Posted inCommunity/News
Fitness, meet food
The Obama’s are doing it, so shouldn’t we do it too? In case you’re in the dark and missed the First Lady digging around on the White House lawn in March, gardening is in the spotlight this year. Of all the reasons to grow your own food, health of the environment and your own body […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Growing Excitement
Just about everyone I know has been pouring over seed catalogs for the last month. Eagerness to plant supplants many other priorities and they begin rifling through each newly arrived issue like a 12-year-old boy with a lingerie catalog. Plans for this year’s garden become an obsession that quickly grows out of all reasonable proportions, […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Spoils from the Soil
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Iowa City Weekender: July 17 – 20
Hey-ya, it’s the weekend! The mid-point of summer has hit and there’s only one way for the amount of sunlight to go from here: down. Fight the humidity and take advantage of every minute. Thursday, July 17 Moving Home Brucemore 2160 Linden Drive SE Cedar Rapids, Iowa Phone: 319/362-7375 Thursday – Saturday, July 17 – […]
