Tour Food Gardens
in Point Reyes Station, Inverness Park, and Inverness
Sunday, October 9th
1:00 to 4:30 pm
Our food garden tour event this past spring generated lots of enthusiasm among participants ranging from novice to experienced food gardeners. Our second seasonal garden tours in October featured four more local gardens. Gardeners provided insight into seasonal food gardening rhythms and give visitors opportunities to learn new strategies and techniques.
Participants chose one, two, or three gardens to tour (one tour in each time slot).
· Gordon and Lily Bryan, Point Reyes Station – Blue Slide Garden, at the edge of “downtown,” is a year-round garden. Gordon Bryan and now next generation, Lily, cultivate the twenty-year old raised garden beds and the newer two-year old area. Vegetables are started from seeds and the many varieties are chosen for taste and hardiness in our climate. Gordon works year-round on succession planting, soil fertility, active composting, and water saving methods of mulching and grey water. Late summer and fall is a time for canning, freezing, and drying the harvest.
· Burton Eubank, Inverness Park - Back by popular demand! In his small garden, Burton promotes density and variety to obtain an abundant daily harvest year-round. The food forest concept is largely employed, and even the fruit trees have multiple grafts to increase variety and yield. Protection methods against common pests are demonstrated, and there are weekly plantings as well as intentional seed production and collection.
· Bruce Mitchell and Nancy Hemmingway, Inverness – In their terraced, south facing hillside garden Bruce and Nancy grow a variety of vegetables in raised beds made from a composite material that is rot and gopher proof. Interspersed with the vegetable beds are plantings of native annual and perennial shrubs and grasses, many of which are chosen to attract a variety of pollinators. Additionally, they have over a dozen fruit trees including stone fruit and citrus varieties. Favorite hand tools were also displayed.
· Mairi Pileggi, Inverness/Seahaven – Mairi welcomes novice and master gardeners, folks who like to experiment, poets, and folks who just like to visit with others. Her garden is her response to becoming resilient as she copes with our climate crisis. Gardening has become a way for her to stay centered (usually) and enjoy fresh food. Mairi welcomed participants among her community of crows, jays, gophers as she described her experiments with growing food. She’s constructed raised beds and is working on the latest project: straw bale gardening.
This was a FREE EVENT. Donations to West Marin Climate Action are gratefully accepted.
About West Marin Climate Action’s Local Food Working Group:
West Marin values locally-produced fresh food and strong community. Considering our changing climate and the increasing frequency of wildfire threat, drought, flooding, not to mention other challenges like earthquake and pandemic, our food supply can become less reliable, and accessible. It makes sense to take action together now, to strengthen our community’s food resilience.
One way to do that is by encouraging more community members to grow our own food – for our own health, for our community’s health, and for our planet’s health.