Happy summer solstice!

It's your longest day of the year and a great time to make some plans for summer fun gardening with your neighbors!

Remember how much fun we had last year? Help us make it even better this year. If you live in this map area, let us know if you’d be willing to host a fair stop. No matter where you live, let us know if you’d like to participate by demonstrating a skill to your neighbors, sharing your favorite garden recipe, introducing us to new ways to use our plants, helping coordinate or promote the event, or supporting the AGAF in another way.

In the meantime, get engaged! Join your neighbors at one of our Happy Hours (first one of the year this Friday, June 24th!), help paint our Mindful Living Garden mural, teach and learn from your neighbors, lend a hand improving our AGA seed library, sharpen those gardening skills by checking out our new AGA YouTube channel, become an AGA event coordinator, or join the AGA outreach team. And save the date for the Harvest Fest Social on Sunday, September 25th!

We have so many resources to share. If you share your time and skills, we can strengthen our neighborhood network and grow access to urban agriculture in Avondale. Summer starts today!

Seedling Swap Recap

You grew them and we moved them! Thanks so much to all of you who grew seedlings for your neighbors, shared your extra seedlings with our efforts, or came out, gave these seedlings a home, and donated to AGA projects. This was our most successful fundraiser to date and we got thousands of seedlings into Avondale hands! And thanks to Metropolitan Brewing for hosting us and giving us access to their HUGE production space that made this ever-expanding event possible! Make sure to follow us this winter as we recruit more seedling growers. Help us populate Avondale gardens with your most tried and true varieties!

Mindful Living Garden Updates

Lots of work going on at the AGA Mindful Living Garden. Community gardening is a health benefit to the gardeners and the surrounding community. It’s also a great way to increase your gardening skills. Our happy hour events are NOT TO BE MISSED and will kick off for the season this Friday! We can always use more hands, including help for Claire to bring her lovely Polish inspired mural to life on our MLG shed!

Spring in the Garden Recap

We had a lovely time at our first annual AGA Spring in the Garden event in Chief O’Neill’s huge, beautiful beer garden! Thanks so much to Rooted, Insect Asylum, Firefly, the U of I extension office, Concordia Teen Entrepreneurs, and Vargo Brother Fermenting, and so many more urban agriculture adjacent local businesses that made the day so successful. We were all charmed by the rescue baby possums, Rooted’s rescue chicken ambassador ChaCha, and the Avondale Community Chicks. We learned about the connection between urban agriculture and nature-based religions, how to do natural dyes and make paper with native seeds embedded, we saw how discarded hardwood can go from the alley to being tooled into useful household implements, we watched a contra dancing demonstration, and so much more. Such a fun day in the neighborhood! We hope you’ll help us make our 2nd annual Spring in the Garden event even more successful next year!

Avondale Community Chickens

At the beginning of May we got five three-day-old chicks. SO TINY! They lived in the science room at Linné Elementary Monday through Friday and went to weekend foster homes, all the while growing like WEEDS! Can you believe the bottom pictures are our community chicks at only 7 weeks?? They are almost old enough to move into their forever home in Linné’s east garden, and are eagerly awaiting their coop and run to be completed. Visit them in the 3200 block of North Richmond starting in July. In the meantime, visit these guys at Rooted. And we are always looking for more community members to join their care team - reach out to get involved!