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Trinity Garden
The Bread & Roses gardens feature accessible raised vegetable beds and beautifully landscaped ornamental plantings around our church building. These gardens serve as a demonstration tool to show people how to raise their own fresh produce and grow their own beauty, even in limited urban space. The vegetables provide tasty ingredients for our community meals and classes, and we share the surplus with local soup kitchens and community groups. Join us for a garden gathering to share skills and get your hands dirty, or contact us to bring a group to visit the garden for a tour or program.
Garden Basics Classes
The Piedmont Master Gardeners hosts a series of FREE gardening classes designed to get new gardeners oriented quickly to important tasks (and botanical rewards) for each season in the gardening calendar. Some classes cover vegetable gardening while others focus on flowers and shrubs.
Please check the calendar to find dates or check out the Piedmont Master Gardener website!
Garden Gatherings
During the growing season (April – October) we meet in the gardens weekly. We share skills, pull weeds, catch up on the week, relax, and enjoy being outside with our hands in the soil. You are welcome to join us, whether you’re a new or experienced gardener. Bad backs and bad knees are totally fine–our beds are accessible and there is a task for every interest, plus gardening gloves in all sizes! Please contact us if you have questions, or would like to be added to our weekly gardening updates email. Check our calendar for garden work days!
Sunday Pop-Up Markets
While much of our produce is distributed to partner organizations in town, on occasional Sunday mornings we have a pop-up market in the parish hall after the 10:30 service so you can get some fresh produce for the week ahead!
Dinner in the Garden
In addition to volunteers being in the garden on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, there is now a Wednesday evening slot from 5:30 - 7:00 pm. Dinner in the garden will be once a month on the last Wednesday of the month through October. It will be a potluck. We hope kids, adults, neighbors and friends will join in. We will have a community meal together perhaps with singing and other activities. Come at whatever time you can!
Watering in the Gardens
We need volunteers to water! We have a schedule of how often different plants need to be watered, and most of our hoses are lightweight and easy to use. We also water some baby trees with gallon jugs of water, and our pots with watering cans!
Help keep Trinity Green this summer, and contact Kristan Pitts for more information at [email protected]
NOTES FROM THE GARDEN
Abundant Life
A visitor to our gardens will be sure to notice an abundance of beautiful flowering plants in Trinity’s landscape gardens blooming happily. Echinacea, Mountain Mint, Milkweed, Black-eyed Susan, Vervain, Salvia, and Hydrangea, are all providing a feast for our eyes and another feast for our smallest visitors as well.
Native bees, butterflies, moths, grasshoppers; ants, earwigs, wasps and aphids all need our plants to thrive. The baby bluebirds nestled under our elderberry bush are fed those insects by their parents. And we need those insects to pollinate the vegetables we grow for our neighbors. Weare all connected, and in the gardens, we can see how a bee helps to feed both a hungry child and a baby bluebird.
Take the echinacea, or purple coneflower as an example. It is lovely to see, but that is not its primary purpose in our landscape. Its pollen and nectar feed bees and butterflies, and it serves as a potential hostplant for the Silvery Checkerspot butterfly and two species of moth, the wavy-lined emerald, and the sunflower moth. The caterpillars will feed the birds, and after the bloom has faded, the seeds provide food for gold finches that help them overwinter in our garden.
God’s abundant gifts are ever-present and visible to us in the gardens.
As Trinity continues to explore the meaning of Creation Care, take some time to visit, explore, pray, or volunteer in the gardens, and see for yourself the beauty of creation.