CCGC Future Agenda/Action Items

Carrboro Community Gardening Coalition

Community Medicinal Herb Garden
We have incorporated a few medicinals into the garden like echinacea, lemon balm, catnip, & yarrow, and many other kitchen herbs that are also healing herbs like parsley, dill, rosemary, cayenne, coriander, summer savory, and anise hyssop. Many of the most valuable medicinals are not appropriate for the garden setting - either because they prefer woodland habitat or because they are agressive or invasive in cultivated soils. I suggest when we extend the garden near the edge or the woods and perhaps creating a spot for woodland plants there. Also, we should not forget that many valuable herbs are wild and all around us in the park. We usually call them "weeds" and do not recognize their value. Plantain, chickweed, cleavers, dandelion, and dock are a few that come to mind. There are few more plants that we could incorporate in the garden for sure. Here's a partial list below. Please add any herbs that you are interested in.

Inside the garden, sun: goldenseal, or solidago, fever few, St. John's Wort, calendula, Nigella, Lavender, Comfrey, chamomile

Woodland, shade to part shade: black cohosh

Valuable, but invasive garden plants: motherwort, stinging nettles

For those interested in learning more about medicinal and/or wild herbs, I would suggest:

The Way of Herbs - by Michael Tierra, as well as Will Endres' classes offered at Central Carolina Community College

-April

Beehive
Last summer I met a guy named Josh Summers who works at NC State in the entomology department. He is very knowledgable, easy to talk to, and a lot of fun. When I met him he showed me and a few other people how to construct a very simple beehive out of wood scraps using a design called a "Kenya design". It is a design that a lot of farmers in Africa use and is pretty ingenious. I got in touch with him this week and told him about what we are doing, and he is very interested in helping us. He lives in Raleigh and has several beehives on his property that he takes care of, and would be very happy to have us over one Saturday to give us a little workshop on the basics of bee husbandry and to help us to build some beehives. So, whenever we are ready, I will get in touch with him and we can set up a Saturday to go over there and learn about bees! Maggie

I'm not sure bees are going to work in this public park setting, but Sammy and I are both keeping our first bees this year, and I would love to see community beekeeping in the future! - April

Shitaki Mushroom Logs and spores
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/nreos/forest/woodland/won-20.html