Spring is here! Our seedlings are off to a great start this year and there are plenty of events geared towards getting people excited about gardening. There’s an organic gardening workshop at the Keepers Garden in West Chicago tomorrow and a gardening workshop for city folk at Design Cloud called Root Therapy. Before going deeper into the details, here’s a TED talk from Ron Finley, a Guerilla Gardener from South Central L.A. to get you in the right mindset. It came to us via Lori McAuliffe Niemtschk.

I’m an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art… I use the garden, the soil, like it’s a piece of cloth. And the plants and trees, that’s my embellishment for that cloth. You’d be surprised what the soil could do if you let it be your canvas. – Ron Finley

Sweet Home Organics will lead the garden class at Keepers Garden, hosted by Nicholas Fuller and People Made Visible. Experience the rewards of growing your own organic veggies and herbs. In this 1+ hour session, we’ll discuss how to manage an organic garden, including pest control and soil amendments. Root Therapy takes place during the last week of Rooted, Grounded, Diana’s show with Benjamin Gardener at Design Cloud. Curator, Angela Bryant, asked us to speak on the panel because we’re always telling her about our garden ventures and she wants us to help inform and equip soil-seekers with sustainable growing options.

The Keepers Garden and Root Therapy are both efforts by artists to get people excited about the growing season and to give people the tools to grow their own food. As I suggested in a previous post, we’re in a period of Art Permaculture. Sometimes the role of the artist is to remind us of what’s important, to call attention to a deficiency in the world around us. Those of us that Finley calls Ecolutionaries, are doing so by empowering our communities to take control over their health.

To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil and we are the soil… Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you could do. Especially in the inner city…. plus you get strawberries. – R. Finley

Last year took a toll on us as Garden Gangsters. It was tough to get excited about starting again after such a dry season but this TED talk helped kick me into gear. I listened to it while sowing squash seeds and they’re starting to take root, just like the Good Food Movement is starting to take hold in our families.