CEGA Announces The 60 Second Garden Challenge
The Chicago Excellence in Gardening Awards (CEGA) will be honoring gardens for a fourth year—though with a twist, thanks to COVID-19. The timing of the pandemic has made it impossible to ramp up the gardening competition in time to take advantage of the summer growing season.
Instead, CEGA is presenting its first-ever 60-Second Garden Video Challenge. Here’s how it works. Gardeners create one-minute videos of their gardens and upload them to the CEGA website. The CEGA Team reviews them for social standards considerations, and posts the videos on the CEGA YouTube Channel. Viewers then use the “thumbs up” to vote for their favorite videos.
The competition is FREE and open to anyone who has a garden or who belongs to a garden, whether it’s a community garden, church or school garden, or even a business garden. Videos can be straightforward, clever, artistic, funny—whatever the gardener chooses. And, for this special contest, entrants need not be from Chicago. We’re looking for 60 second videos of gardens from anywhere in the world.
Videos that receive the most votes will be posted on the CEGA website and on its social media pages. Those gardeners will receive a certificate, but more prizes are in the works. Stay tuned.
Videos will be accepted now through September 30, with monthly top vote-getters being announced. The full set of rules can be found at https://chicagogardeningawards.org/
The Chicago Excellence in Gardening Alliance is a 501(c)(3) Illinois not-for-profit organization. Each year since 2017, it has presented the Chicago Excellence in Gardening Awards, Chicago’s only citywide gardening honors recognizing the hard work and creativity that make our city a healthier, more beautiful and more sustainable place. The awards support the pride we take in our neighborhoods and help us build our communities.
In 2019, its third year, the CEGA committee honored gardens from 43 wards and 76 Chicago communities. From simple parkways to elegant home gardens to large and productive urban farms, these gardens exemplify the Chicago motto, adopted in 1837, “Urbs in Horto.”