Join us for live music, a special dinner featuring school gardens’ produce and local food, fresh apple cider, and local beverages.
Lower Columbia School Gardens invites you to our annual Fall Gathering on November 9th from 6-9pm to celebrate our accomplishments and sustain this good work into the future. Come and enjoy the best food, beverages, and company this season has to offer.
Where: Cowlitz County Event Center Floral Building 1900 7th Avenue Longview, WA 98632
Saturday May 11, from 9:00 to 1:00 at Northlake Elementary, 2210 Olympia Way.
Come get your School Garden veggies, herbs, flowers, and perennials! We will be joined again by Watershed Garden Works who offer a wide variety of native, edible, and ornamental plants.
Enjoy live music, explore the Garden and Orchard, and meet celebrity garden rabbits. We hope you will attend this festive event that is part plant sale, part celebration of life, food, and community.
Join us for live music, a special dinner featuring school gardens’ produce and local food, fresh apple cider, and local beverages.
Lower Columbia School Gardens invites you to our annual Fall Gathering on November 11th from 6-9pm to celebrate our accomplishments and sustain this good work into the future. Come and enjoy the best food, beverages, and company this season has to offer.
Where: Cowlitz County Event Center Floral Building 1900 7th Avenue Longview, WA 98632
Saturday May 13, from 9:00 to 1:00 at Northlake Elementary, 2210 Olympia Way.
Come get your School Garden veggies, herbs, flowers, and perennials! We will be joined again by Watershed Garden Works who offer a wide variety of native, edible, and ornamental plants.
Enjoy live music, explore the Garden and Orchard, and meet celebrity garden rabbits. We hope you will attend this festive event that is part plant sale, part celebration of life, food, and community. Thank you so much for supporting local School Gardens – together we are making a real difference!
Saturday May 7, from 9:00 to 1:00 at Northlake Elementary, 2210 Olympia Way.
Come get your School Garden veggies, herbs, flowers, and perennials! We will be joined again by Watershed Garden Works who offer a wide variety of native, edible, and ornamental plants, and Willow Grove Gardens with hanging flower baskets. Enjoy live music, explore the Garden and Orchard, and meet celebrity garden rabbits Sam and Satou.
We hope you will attend this festive event that is part plant sale, part celebration of life, food, and community.
Thank you so much for supporting local School Gardens – together we are making a real difference!
Has Lower Columbia School Gardens had a positive impact on you or your family in 2020? As you probably know, we were unable to do our regular Spring garden programs with students so we shifted to growing food, helping our community grow food, and giving away fresh produce. We’d especially love to hear from people who received container gardens, plants, seeds for their home gardens, and/or free produce this year. Email us at info@lcschoolgardens.org or call/text 360-200-8918 if you’d be willing to speak to a School Gardens staff member about your experience, or fill out this survey to share your story with us. Thank you!
It can be hard to talk with kids about racism. But we know that by preschool age, many kids have already learned racial bias. It’s so important to start talking with kids about race and racism early and often, even if we do so imperfectly.
If you want some help figuring out where to start or how to continue to engage with your kids about race, check out these two videos. The first is from Dr. Kira Banks and a panel of parents with varying perspectives and helpful tools for engaging in conversations about race with kids. And the second is a Sesame Street town hall Q&A both kids and adults can enjoy and learn from.
LCSG cares a great deal about the health of our community; it’s a core part of our mission to promote healthy eating, and provide access to fresh produce in Longview and Kelso. We also know that fighting racism is an important way to ensure everyone can thrive.
Pervasive and systemic racism is the reason Black, Indigenous, Latinx and other communities of color suffer disproportionately from completely preventable conditions like chronic diseases, shortened life expectancy, poor birth outcomes, and increased mortality from COVID-19.
Racism is a public health crisis. While our organization can and will continue to grow nutritious and delicious food, we will also work to undo our own implicit biases, and address the racist systems that prevent communities of color from accessing education, employment, safe and affordable housing and healthy food so that they can expect the same quality of life that white communities do.
To learn more, check out this article from Pew Trusts:
As our team continues to learn and act on what it means to be anti-racist, we feel called to consider the perspective and experiences of Black and Indigenous people and communities, both historically and in present day.
As a staff of white people, most of us have positive and pleasant memories of Fourth of July celebrations. Most of us also did not learn until much later in life that the phrase “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence did not actually mean ALL people. That same well-known document also refers to Indigenous people as “merciless Indian Savages”.
Not until 100 years after that first Independence Day in 1776 were some African American people granted freedom from enslavement. Countless Indigenous people were violently displaced from lands that were their home, or were murdered by those who colonized this continent that some know as North America, but so many still recognize as Turtle Island.
In the midst of a holiday weekend of national celebration, LCSG is committed to meditating on and learning about the many ways our country continues to perpetuate injustice, and the oppression of so many.
We look forward to the day when this nation is a place where all beings can thrive and we want to play an active role in bringing that to life.
**This post has been updated as of 5/12/20 to reflect changes to pick up schedule on Fridays, and how long ordering will be available for the week.**
You might be thinking to yourself – how does an online Plant Sale work? – and we definitely understand your curiosity about that!
Please read all the way through before visiting the shop and placing a plant order
We’re excited to offer plant sales online this year, and hope this new format might allow more folks to take home our lovingly-grown plants than ever before.
We’ll operate a no-contact pick up process over the course of several weeks, which is really different from the one-day in-person Plant Sale from previous years!
The online Plant Sale kicked off 5/6/20. **Each week the “shop” will open Wed 5 pm – Thurs 11:59 pm, or it will close when we’ve received 80 orders for the week (whichever comes first).** Different plants will become available as they are ready and healthy enough to sell – here is the list of all the plants we will have at some point during the course of the online Plant Sale:
We will not be doing any in-person/on-site orders; please do all of your ordering online through the website. We will be unable to make any changes to your order during pick up – if there are changes you need made to your order prior to pick up, please text/call 360-200-8918. Changes to your order may result in your pick up time/date being rescheduled.
We realize not everyone is able to pay via credit card or other online routes, so if you have no other option than cash or check please reach out to us before placing your order so we can make the necessary arrangements.
EBT/SNAP We are also able to take EBT as payment for edible plants. Since we will be doing a majority of the orders online with credit card and no-contact pick up, we will need to make special arrangements for any transactions that involve EBT. Instead of ordering online, please contact us if this option is something you’re interested in. We want to make this work, and though it may not be particularly graceful yet, we will do our best to figure it out.
We ask and encourage everyone to use their best judgment and limit the numbers of plants they order so more of our community members are able to participate in growing their own food.
This whole process may take a little more cooperation and patience than usual from our staff as well as our community to keep everyone safe and healthy, not only as we work out the hiccups in our new system but as we maintain physical distancing to the best of our abilities. With that in mind…
ORDER FULFILLMENT & PICK UP Orders will be filled and ready for no-contact pick up at The Northlake Garden,2210 Olympia Way, Longview, WA 98632 on Friday afternoons, based on the first letter of your last name.
**Times listed below may have changed since the first week of the sale – please take a second look:
Last Name A – F: 1:00 – 1:45
Last Name G – L: 1:45 – 2:30
**Last Name M – R: 2:30 – 3:00
**Last Name S – Z: 3:00 – 3:30
If the specified time/window does not work for you, please contact us at 360-200-8918 to make other arrangements
When you arrive at your designated time on Friday, please pull up to the curb closest to the Northlake Garden (along Olympia Way), facing Ocean Beach Hwy and remain in your vehicle.
Have your order number and last name ready to provide to a School Garden Team Member, or **better yet (if it is possible for you) already have it clearly displayed in your passenger side window when you arrive**. If you are unable to make it to your scheduled pick up time please contact us at the phone number above as soon as possible.
We have a limited number of boxes (cardboard or otherwise) available, so if you’d like a container for your plants please plan to bring your own.
We will maintain 6-foot physical distancing for the safety of our staff and customers and we ask that you wait until we set your order next to your vehicle prior to getting out and loading it.
If you need some assistance with loading your order, please let us know!
Please stay home if you are sick or have been in contact with anyone who is sick. Ask someone who you haven’t been in close contact with to pick up your order, or get in touch with us for no-contact delivery: email info@lcschoolgardens.org or call/text 360-200-8918
Ways that we’ll be staying safe:
Our staff will wash their hands regularly; we’ll have hand-washing stations set up to make this easy.
Staff will wear face masks and clean garden gloves to avoid the spread of germs when touching plant pots and trays.
Often-touched surfaces will be cleaned and sanitized frequently.
Bird’s Eye View Map & Brief Directions for Plant Sale Pick Up from Northlake Garden
COMMUNITY In these challenging times, we know that many of us can’t afford to purchase plants. That’s just a reality for a lot more folks than usual, so please reach out if you are in need of plants and cannot pay for them at this time. We want to do what we can to make sure as many folks in our community as possible have access to food they can grow in the coming months. Email info@lcschoolgardens.org or call/text 360-200-8918
Do you have an abundance of resources and can help cover some of the cost of plants for families or folks in need? Donate here and write in the description “Gift Plants” and we will continue to share plants with the community as long as we have them available.
GIVING CREDIT! THANK YOU to our friends at Tilth Alliance in Seattle, WA for all their help with the process of getting our Plant Sale online, and the wording to share. We hope that their recent (annual) Edible Plant Sale was a huge success!
