ocean friendly garden holiday update

[Sarah Damron]

Hellooo gardeners~

We haven't connected in a couple weeks, so I thought I would send out an update and check in with you all.  Things have been slow in the garden over the past few weeks, but there has been movement elsewhere.

Monterey OFG Blog

To document our project, I have started a blog. Check it out! http://montereyofg.blogspot.com/  The plan is to go back and retroactively post some of the work we've already done, but it will take time to do that.  If anyone else wants to help with that (by either writing content or doing a full blog post on a past demo day or other plans), please let me know...I would love your assistance!

Signage

To bring more visibility to our project and help promote what we're doing, a few of us have thought it would be awesome to get some signage up.  It doesn't need to be fancy...maybe just a couple yards signs that identify the project and/or promote principles.  One of the graphics created from Surfrider's Know Your H20 program that I love is the "Kill Your Lawn" bumper sticker (http://groups.google.com/group/montereyofg/web/bumper_kill%20your%20lawn.pdf?hl=en)...maybe that could be useful.  In any case, it would be great if someone wanted to take the lead on this particular project and come back to the group with proposed content and/or graphic.  Any takers?

Monterey County Gives $ Campaign

As you will recall, we submitted our Ocean Friendly Garden project for the Monterey County Gives campaign in an effort to raise funds for future phases of the garden project.  One group has raised over $20,000 through the campaign!  We have raised $45  =(  But, we still have time!  The campaign ends on Dec. 31, so we need your help to spread the word to friends (even your Facebook friends will do!) to ask them to make a donation to this effort so we can benefit from partial matching from the Weekly.  Here's the link to donate:  https://www.montereycountygives.com/Donate.aspx  

Plant Donation

I have been in contact with a couple ladies from the Hilton Bialek Habitat in Carmel and they are interested in donating plants to our effort-- woohoo!  They just need to know when we're ready for them.  For us to be "ready", we will need to decide where they will go in the landscape and figure out maintenance (i.e. irrigation).  Although we would like them to make use of their climate-adapted traits, if we want the plants to establish and thrive we will probably need to plan to make sure they get some kind of water, albeit minimal, on a regular basis, so we will want to keep future irrigation needs in mind as well in planning our plantings.  That said... 

Next Steps

...time for a meeting?  Let's work to schedule a meeting sometime in January (unless sooner is better) to talk about Phase II (funds and plans), promotion, blogging, etc.  That's not to say we can't get anything done in the meantime, but the timing in January will be good since we will know how the Monterey County Gives campaign turned out for us.  Please let me know if any of you are particularly constrained by your schedule and we can take that into account in setting a date.  

If anyone else has any updates, please feel free to share!

Happy Holidays to all of you!  

Cheers,

Sarah  

Sarah Damron

Central California Regional Manager

Surfrider Foundation

sda...@surfrider.org

cell: 831 239 1520

Searching for the perfect holiday gift?  Check out Surfrider's Holiday Membership Package: https://www.surfrider.org/gift