Wednesday, September 09, 2009

bvg harvest celebration: seed swap and giant vegetable contest

Belmont Victory Gardens Harvest Celebration: Seed Swap & Giant Vegetable Contest

Where: The Event will take place at the Belmont Victory Gardens, (next to Rock Meadow, Mill Street, Belmont MA) on Saturday October 3rd 2009 from 2pm-4pm.

The Seed & Plant Swap offers a chance to share divisions of your raspberries, rhubarb, day lilies, and other perennials. Also seeds you have collected or bought, new or out-of-date. Seeds for vegetables, herbs, ornamentals, annuals, and perennials. The swap provides access to FREE stuff while helping to support local food growing. Join us as the season ends and you begin planning for next year's garden. Avoid wasting what you can't use. One person's surplus is another person's windfall.

We hope the Swap will be lively and full of surprises as neighbors share growing tips as well as seeds and plants. Trade seed packets, plants, bulbs, and divisions, one-for-one.

Bring: Perennial flower divisions, raspberry and rhubarb divisions, bulbs and tubers like garlic and dahlias. Any type of seeds, including packets or hand collected, flowers or vegetables, annuals or perennials.

Also bring your biggest homegrown vegetable for the Giant Vegetable Contest. A prize will be given for the biggest!

Cost: FREE

For more details contact Kathy at kjm@bioarray.us

4 comments:

Marian(London)UK said...

Hey, good luck and good idea. Have you time and the assistance of fellow community garden friends to help you produce a flier to deliver to local houses (with our festival this just meant employing people to walk local neighbourhood roads to post fliers through doors or in to post boxes). Also to ask shop keepers; Libraries; Doctors surgeries (We promoted and quoted the governments eat healthy 5 veg/fruit a day with Drs. surgeries here)to display it. We also produced a few larger poster type fliers which we attached to local park gates and put on Supermarket note boards. It worked well. It is amazing how interested local gardeners are.
Marian(LondonUK)

Marian(LondonUK) said...

P.S.When I say employed, I meant engaged voluntarily!
Marian(LondonUK)

kathy said...

HI Marian,

I'm afraid to advertise it because I never organized or been to this type of event. I'm not really sure how to set up the swapping. This will be an experiment to see how it works out.

I'll put up a canopy in case of rain and a couple of tables. After that, I'm not sure.

I suppose people walk around and see who has what and what that they might want to swap for.

Both Johnny's and Botanical Interests are sending some seeds to give out. These may make a good Giant Vegetable Contest prize. I'm so pleased that both places I asked are sending a box. In the spring, we occasionally have free seeds to give out at our clean up day, and all of the gardeners really love these.

Please let me know if you've ever been to a seed swap or if you have suggestions.

Marian(LondonUK) said...

Hi Kathy, if it's o.k. I will email you this evening with a few things we did which may help as I don't want to block up your blog! One thing I did though was typed up a few notices, a friend laminated them and we pinned them on to the gates at my site and her site a few weeks before to get interest going and people seed sorting.

With an avid bunch of readers with different occupations out there, there may be someone from local press or radio that gets knowledge or just enjoys your postings that would do you a freebie!

Speak later.
Marian(LondonUK)