News

Seed Celebration & Sustainable Community Fair – February 16, 2013

The Sustainability Project together with Keene State College Campus Ecology hosts the 8th Annual Seed Celebration and Sustainable Community Fair on February 16th, from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. at the Keene State College Putnam Science Center. This family-focused event enables all participants to attend skill-building workshops, stock up on organic seeds, learn about local food,  environmental and sustainable community initiatives. There will be children’s activities and more than 20 workshops and presentations throughout the day.

Come boost your community’s skills for living well in a changing world. This year’s presentations, so far, include: Planting your First Vegetable Garden, Creating Sustainable Relationships, Beekeeping, Biochar, Home Made Herbal Remedies, Composting, Vermiculture,  Mindfulness and Sustainability, Visualizing One’s Way to  Right Livelihood, Solar Basics for the Home, Farm, and Business, Organizing a Community Garden, Permaculture: Designing Self-sustaining Systems, Going Out Green: Exploring Sustainable and Meaningful End-of-Life Options, GMO Awareness, Mycological Landscaping, and the Dos and Don’ts of Caring for Your Animal Friends.

At the event, representatives from local non-profits will be on hand sharing their stories and inviting the community to be part of their success. Vendor tables will enable the community to ‘buy local’.

This year, we’re offering the event free of charge in order to ensure that no one will be discouraged from attending due to lack of funds.

Over the years, farmers, gardeners, and activists working for sustainable communities have come to know this event as a great opportunity for networking and day-long fun.

Stoddard School Champions School Garden

Originally Posted at Vision 2020; By Laura White, James Faulkner Elementary

At James Faulkner Elementary School in Stoddard, our vision states that we see students “working on real projects.”  One way we work to incorporate this into the day-to-day life of the school is through our school garden.  A garden provides numerous opportunities for academic integration at all grade levels, whether it is calculating the volume of a raised bed, making change at the dismissal-time farm stand, reading recipes in order to cook our home-grown produce or learning about the prepositions “above” and “below” while studying the parts of the potato plant.

cgcstaff's avatarKeene Community Garden Connections

What do you get when you combine hummus, crayons, and laughter? A wealth of dreams.

Last week, just hours before our CGC team was to embark across the country to join families for the Thanksgiving holiday, we hosted a meeting specifically designated for us to dream up all the grand ideas we could conjure for the future of Community Garden Connections. We called it our “retreat.”

Meeting at the cozy home of our faithful advisor, Libby McCann, we started our dream session with a hike in the woods followed by local snacks. While these factors may sound trivial, they are indeed some of the most crucial components to encouraging our brains and hearts to entertain nearly unfathomable ideas.

We chose to separate this retreat into two areas of focus: first, this next year and second, a time period with no deadline. This first half of our session was important because…

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