Full Contact Gardening

A friend of this blog has tipped us off to a great new contest with the environment in mind.

The event, dubbed the “350 Garden Challenge,” is a countywide effort to create awareness of the value of community and residential gardens that save water and grow food. Organizers of the contest—a nonprofit group called Sonoma County Health Action—seeks to have 350 Sonoma County gardens registered by the end of this week.

According to the organization’s Web site, where gardeners must register to participate, each garden can be as large or as little as the gardener wishes. Wine barrels, edibles, fruit trees and drought-tolerant natives all count toward creating an oasis of gardens all over the county.

From igrow.com

The contest will conclude May 16 with a celebration at Juilliard Park in Santa Rosa.

Health Action’s Web site also offers a number of resources for helping first-time gardeners become green thumbs. Some of these resources include growing guides, recommendations for watering, planting schedules and more. What’s more, the site lists detailed directions for starting something called a “Neighborhood Growing Wheel,” a cooperative effort between neighbors and friends to create and nurture food gardens throughout the neighborhood.

Finally, the Web site provides a calendar of a number of gardening events in communities from Petaluma to Cloverdale, as well as information about Garden Camp, an ongoing workshop series held at the Sonoma Garden Park in downtown Sonoma.

Sounds like our kind of camp, for sure.

Want more garden info? The Sonoma County Tourism Bureau has a collection of them here: Sonoma County Gardens and Flowers