New Year & Year End Message
Happy New Year, community gardeners!
It’s still the first few days of 2025, so we can profit from looking back at 2024 to acknowledge all that CCGA has accomplished and set out to do for 2025. We hope gardeners have been enjoying the holidays and are taking some time to rest from the labors of the garden as we embark on a new year. We notice that the days are getting longer. While January and February may seem quiet months in the garden, it does not mean that nothing is happening. The soil has been open to the sky, drinking in what rainfall we have had, and the roots of plants we have left will feed beneficial microbes.
Not a lot of snow flurries yet, but we have had a flurry of activity. Our community gardens formed a vital bridge between each other and the natural world. We’ve highlighted just a few of the many incredible things that have been happening in community gardens! Read on!
Chicago had what seemed like a record in Chicago had what seemed like a record number of seed swaps last spring, dozens of them! More native plants sales appeared, many of them to fund successful bird conservation programs. Avid CCGA gardeners eagerly attended these and started growing in their community gardens when temperatures climbed and days lengthened.
We all want to be surrounded by color and living beauty while growing food for our families. Chicago Community Gardeners were able to enjoy spring flowers at The Chicago Botanic Garden, which offered free admission days in March to welcome spring season’s arrival! Seed swaps are already being posted in 2025 so watch the CCGA Facebook page for more and don’t forget to let us know before we miss yours.
CCGA Resources and Distribution Committee
Participating in this year’s distributions and workshops and now posting on the CCGA Facebook page are two volunteers in Resources and Distribution. Welcome, Eve Venable, who joined CCGA as one of its most creative and active members. And, Deb Jensen is a most welcome contributor to CCGA’s Facebook page.
Catching up with a busy team of growers in Resources this year fills a lot of space, we saw them produce a high volume of plants for distribution, create new and interesting workshops and they did it all with volunteers!
Resources accomplished so much in 2024 that we have a SEPARATE POST that highlights their events and accomplishments.
With its strong relationships and contacts throughout the growing community Resources worked to build a supply chain for plants into gardens which extended through almost every month of the entire year.
Garfield Park Tour
Did you know that Garfield Park has been growing fresh local food in community gardens and marketing it since 2007? While the 2024 tour of Garfield Park gardens was a repeat of the 2023 very successful tour, with additional gardens from the that tour. Many folks visited these gardens for the first time.
This tour, which was led by Ms Gina Jamison, is always a welcome experience for everyone. Gardens selected for the tour were Relish, Fulton Garden, Chicago Farm Works, Limes Smiles for Miles, Kuumba Tre-Ahm Community Garden, Westbrooks Memorial Park, and Fulton Street Flower & Vegetable Garden. Participants could meet at the Gold Dome for a bus ride or travel on their own. The tour ended at The Hatchery with lunch for participants, a food demo, and tour of the non-profit food hub. At the Hatchery, the Garfield Park Neighborhood Market offered fresh garden produce alongside homemade specialties like jars of cha cha, or green tomato salsa. Organizers hope to see people again next year.
Julie Samuels
We mourned this summer over the loss of our dear gardening friend and mentor Julie Samuels who passed away in July of 2024. Keep track of our efforts to remember Julie in the new year HERE.
Legacy Gardener Films Update
Our file project titled: ‘How to Keep it Going’, sowing seeds for the gardens of tomorrow – the CCGA documentary portrayal of legacy gardeners was presented in a screening in May 2024 in the Jensen Room at The Garfield Park Conservatory. Follow the progress as we try and capture the memories of our oldest gardeners HERE.
Volunteer with CCGA in 2025
CCGA works if we all pitch in a bit and help each other out. If you have any time to devote to enabling and helping our gardneing communities thrive then you have come to the right place.
Our Resources & Distributions team always needs help and is our biggest team of volunteers. But our Communications team is smaller and needs help in posting events to the calendar and website and working on quarterly newsletters type stuff and managing our technical needs.
The Advocacy & Outreach team is also a key element of our ability to respond to big-picture events and policy that directly affect how we garden and live. They work with outside entitles, the city of Chicago and other quasi-municipal groups to get things done.
CCGA Monthly Meetings
Please join us for our monthly coordinating meetings. Representatives from all the working groups come together to coordinate our actions. All community gardeners and supporters are invited to attend. The meeting schedule for 2025 is HERE.
CCGA coordinating meetings are always held on the 3rd Tuesday of the month, except for July & August. Most CCGA Coordinating meetings are being held via Zoom. In-person meeting locations may switch between The Hatchery Chicago & the Chicago Center for Green Technology.
If you want to attend the coordinating meeting and are not already a member of one of the CCGA working groups, please send an email to: communications@chicagocommunitygardens.org and request to join the monthly meetings.
NOTE: All CCGA coordinating meeting minutes are available for you to review on the website. Look under the menu tree at ‘Who We Are’ and then ‘CCGA Organization’ and you will see links here for the coordinating committee documents by year.