Selu Garden and Service Club to kick off 2015 gardening season

The Selu Garden and Service Club will host a planning workshop for its 2015 garden on Feb. 8 at 2 p.m. in the Barn at the Selu Conservancy.

The event, sponsored by Club Programming Committee, is free and open to the public.

The working session will be focused on amping up production of the Selu garden and helping Radford University and community gardeners learn more about the art of gardening, said club President Will Dowd.

The workshop will feature presentations by two teams of guest experts:

• Jason Pall and Sally Walker of Blacksburg's Glade Road Growing. Glade Road Growing is a profitable small-scale farm raising three acres of vegetables, 1,500 pastured broilers and 175 laying ducks. Glade Road Growing practices a biologically intensive production system while using small-scale, low-tech equipment.
  
  
• Cathy and Jim Crawford of Roanoke. Cathy is a professional landscaper who has designed, installed and maintained ornamental gardens for over 20 years. A volunteer community gardener at Roanoke’s Mountain View Community Garden, Jim is also a cultural geographer, filmmaker, writer, musician and carpenter.

The Selu garden is a 100-foot by 60-foot garden with 10 beds that generated more than 100 pounds of organic vegetables for area food pantries and club members last year. The club began the garden to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Convervancy last year and hopes to boost its production and introduce more RU students, faculty and staff to the joys and beauty of both gardening and the Conservancy, Dowd said.

"If you want to make friends, share a bag of home grown tomatoes with people," Dowd said. "Gardening is a healthy way to stay active and connect with the land that provides us our food."

For more information and to register for the Selu Garden Planning Workshop, contact Dowd at wdowd2@radford.edu or 540-494-3541.