BIG NEWS!!!

**Blessed Solstice**, dear Friends of The Green Farmacy Garden!

Today we’re thrilled to share with our community that local non-profit The Community Ecology Institute (CEI) has purchased The Green Farmacy Garden and committed to stewarding Jim and Peggy Duke’s legacy at their former home for the foreseeable future!!

Everyone who’s stewarded the Garden to date is so grateful and excited for the Garden’s longevity and impact to expand under CEI’s management.  You can read about CEI’s MissionStaff and Board, and Programs on their website, as well as their purchase of the Duke property.

And tomorrow morning around 9:30am, you can catch the live rebroadcast of NBC Today Show‘s uplifting segment about CEI, which first aired earlier this year!

Wishing you and yours the Happiest of Holidays, and looking forward to seeing you at the Garden again in the New Year!

-The Green Farmacy Garden Team

Advertisement
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 4 Comments

Featured Event

Our first Inoculation Workshop in September sold out so we’re offering an encore – join us this Sunday to learn about growing edible mushrooms at home and take home a log that will produce delicious food for you for years to come!

Mushroom Log Inoculation Workshop

Sunday, November 6, 2022, 1-3:30pm

Learn about fungi and inoculate your own log.

This two-part workshop will begin with information-sharing about the life cycle of some commonly grown mushroom species participants may want to learn to work with, and culminate with participants practicing the skill of inoculating a log with fungal spawn, to take home and harvest later.

Click here for more information and registration!

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Summer Community Day this Saturday July 16!!

Join us for a day of nature & fellowship this Saturday afternoon into the warm summer evening.

Our friends @_mountainspring_ will be joining us to share their touching heart songs & made these beautiful green flyers! Mountain Spring Music

Come bask in the glory of Dr. and Mrs. Duke’s lovingly curated global plant collection and lush grounds. Learn about the garden, its founders, its treasures, & experience a sampling of our herbal programming.

**edit:: the medicine making harvest & demonstration will be immediately after the garden tour, at 4:15**

Bring snacks, drinks, or a dish if you feel called to share in the community potluck at 6pm down by the big gazebo where Mountain Spring will be performing & the big wood fire chimney will be lit. Or just bring a picnic for your party to enjoy wherever you feel called on the land! The evening is yours.

This is a family friendly event & we love children to attend! There will be no child care or child-specific programming, but kids are welcome to use the art supplies and encouraged to participate in community activities.

Follow this link for more information & registration!

We hope to meet you in the garden!✨🌿💜

/

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Pop-Up Basket-Weaving this Sunday, July 3 

We’ve got a fun assortment of public events this month, but first a pop-up workshop weaving baskets with all the wisteria that’s just been removed. Got a few hours to explore pragmatic plant uses before your cookout? Join us!

Learn to forage plant materials to create your own baskets in a pre-cookout Pop-Up Workshop

In this workshop, students will:

  • Receive an introduction to some regionally common plant species useful for weaving baskets
  • Explore the landscape to select and harvest their own skeleton material
  • Receive instruction in 2 beginner basket styles, and
  • Use pre-harvested wisteria, or harvest additional material, with which to weave their own basket

Click here for more information and registration!

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Community Earth Day Celebration

Fairy and Gnome house construction was a highlight of the day! Friends of the Garden Julie and Zosia Biedrzycki guided families to source abundant, regenerative, and/ or dead materials from the site to craft and decorate their structures.

Unfortunately we didn’t get any shots from Live Staking willows along the stream bank, but our foraging group was engaged and met a ton of new plant friends!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

UPDATE: Position Filled [re: Gardener Wanted!]

UPDATE: THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED – THANKS FOR YOUR INTEREST. Please visit Work With Us! or Volunteering for current opportunities to work in the Garden.

———————————————————————————————————————-

The Green Farmacy Garden is seeking a part-time gardener to join our team! Applications will be accepted here, through our managing organization, Maryland University of Integrative Health, until November 5.

Garden Position Announcement

Title: Gardener for Jim Duke’s Green Farmacy Garden

Schedule: Part-time (8h/wk this season, increasing to 20h/wk March 1, 2022), to begin immediately

Compensation: $18/hr

Location: Fulton, Maryland (between Baltimore & Washington DC)

Job Description

The Green Farmacy Garden is an educational medicinal plant garden comprising four terraces with eighty plots, representing Jim Duke’s book The Green Pharmacy. This is an excellent opportunity to work with medicinal plants from around the globe.

Seasonal garden maintenance requires seeding, planting, pruning, mulching, weeding, and raking. Other routine garden tasks include pond maintenance, irrigation maintenance, building trellises, moving tropical plants into and out of the greenhouse to place them in the plots, as well as some woodland trail maintenance. The gardener may also be invited to assist with educational tours and workshops or other aspects of operations, based on their experience, skillset, and motivation. 

Learn more about the Garden and its founder, Dr. James A. Duke, at thegreenfarmacygarden.com

Essential Functions:

The candidate must:

– be able to load, move, and unload a wheelbarrow of mulch or compost,

– drive rebar and vertical supports into rocky clay garden soil,

– safely balance and exert force across distance from a 10′ ladder,

– wrest taproots from the ground with minimal soil disturbance using a hori hori or shovel, and

– be prepared to cope with the demands of working outdoors alongside rural insects and reptiles in a variety of weather situations.

Education and Experience Qualifications:

Required: None

Preferred:

  • Knowledge in these and related fields:
    • herbal medicine
    • botany & plant identification
    • native & invasive plant species
    • composting
    • permaculture
  • Experience in these and related arenas:
    • gardening
    • horticulture
    • ecology
    • herbalism
    • social justice
    • mutual aid

Skills and Abilities:

Communication skills are very important here, as we strive to nurture a leaderful work team while maintaining open information-sharing sufficient to keep all staff apprised on task progress.

While not required for this position, qualifications in any of these additional skill sets could be valuable to our team from a candidate eager to contribute them:

  • Ancestral or apprenticed knowledge and practice of any global indigenous herbal tradition
  • Marketing, fund-raising, grant-writing
  • Website maintenance, social media management, content generation
  • Herbal medicine-making
  • Clinical herbalism
  • Non-profit experience
  • Networking, inter-organizational collaboration
  • Photography
  • Event management
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Community Day Rescheduled

Thunderstorms tend to drop considerable debris from trees in the garden and woods. In the interest of safety and enjoyment, we’ve pushed back the Community Day planned for tomorrow to the Rain Date of October 30, due to expected afternoon thunderstorms on the 16th. We hope you’ll join us!

And of course, if you’re eager to visit even sooner, we’ve got Maryland State Mead-Making Champion Julie Biedrzycki offering back-to-back workshops next Saturday 10/23: Infuse-Your-Booze and Magical Mead-Making; and our first Volunteer Day since June on Sunday 10/24!

October Community Day

Saturday, October 30, 2021, 1-8pm

Ticketed tour & workshop segment in the afternoon will be followed by community connection in the evening. Join us for both!

The ticketed instructional portion of the day, from 1-5pm, will comprise our annual Turmeric Harvest workshop, tours of the garden and grounds, and a fruit-leather demonstration using invasive autumn berries (aka autumn olives). Ticket-holders and members of the public are welcome to connect and commune in the evening around the fire with a potluck meal.

Schedule

Ticketed Instructional Afternoon:

  • 12:30 Grounds Open to ticket-holders
  • 1:00 Tour of The Green Farmacy Garden
  • 2:00 Turmeric Harvest & Repot
  • 3:30 Edible Plant Walk incl. Autumn Berry Harvest & Fruit Leather

Communal Evening (Tickets not required):

  • 5:00 Potluck Meal (bring your own vessels & utensils, and a dish to share labelled with ingredients)
  • 6:00 Communal Fire, Music, & Story-Share
  • 8:00 Grounds Close

Click here for more information and registration!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Our Events are Back on Track!

After a transitional period in which we were unable to host visitors, our Events Calendar is full to brimming again for the month of October, and we’re thrilled to welcome our community back to enjoy and share the garden’s message and mission.

This month, we’re hosting another Community Day with tours, demos, and potluck; our first weekend Volunteer Day since June(!!); and back-to-back herbal magic workshops with our good friend, Maryland State Mead Champion Julie Biedrzycki. Check out all the offerings below (titles and pics link to events) and come celebrate the turn of the season with us!

Fire Cider Workshop

Saturday, October 9, 2021, 11am-1:30pm

We’ll be harvesting herbal allies to make fire cider.

October Community Day

Saturday, October 16, 2021, 1-8pm

Ticketed tour & workshop segment in the afternoon will be followed by community connection in the evening. Join us for both!

Infuse Your Booze

Saturday, October 23, 2021, 10am-1pm

Learn to craft your own herbal infusions for medicine and pleasure with Maryland Champion mead-maker Julie Biedrzycki.

sp

Magical Mead-Making

Saturday, October 23, 2021 2-5pm

Learn to craft your own herbal mead with Maryland State Champion mead-maker Julie Biedrzycki.

spac

October Volunteer Day

Sunday, October 24, 2020, 1-4pm

We need all hands on deck to help get the tropicals out of the garden so they can stay safe and warm inside over the winter!

space

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Plant Gorgeosity

We’ve had a number of species blooming this season that have skipped a season or more, and are delighted to welcome the community back to enjoy their exuberance in a few short weeks, when we host the season’s first Community Day on September 18 – opening the garden and grounds for people to explore and connect, with or without participating in the day’s programming.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Sold Out: CICADAFEST May 22, 2021

No ticket sales at the door.

The Green Farmacy Garden is hosting CICADAFEST on May 22, 2021. Two mini-tours of Dr. James Duke’s famous medicinal herb garden will be offered to attendees during event hours; local musicians will perform; and attendees are invited to participate in communal and individual artistic expression. Email us with questions at greenfarmacygarden@gmail.com. Hail Brood X!

Cicadafest

Saturday, May 22, 2021, 11am-7pm

Who’s excited for Brood X’s imminent emergence?! Celebrate the coolest cicada brood with art, music, cicada-cuisine, and community.

The cicadas have been emerging on the premises so our celebration will include them at every juncture. Visitors can tour Dr. Duke’s world-class medicinal herb garden, enjoy the musical offerings of our performers or take the stage yourself, make art using myriad supplies including cicada shells, and take part in the communal cicada sampling*.

Schedule of events:

  • 10:30am Admission begins
  • 11am Garden Tour (45 min)
  • 12-1:45pm communal Cicada Sampling*
  • 2pm Live Music: Dunn Goyle Salesmen
  • 3pm Garden Tour (45 min)
  • 4pm Live Music Teporah Bilezikian ft. Bud Stracker
  • 5pm Open Stage to share your own cicada tribute
  • 5:30pm Guided Embodiment practice inspired and informed by physical yogic practices

Other All Day Activities

  • Kids’ Art (cicada coloring pages and nature collage)
  • Community Art (collaborative cicada shell story-scape, sidewalk chalk)
  • Jams (community created, in the woods, the field, by the pond – wherever strikes your fancy)
  • Community, cicadas and other wildlife, and the verdant garden and grounds of The Green Farmacy Garden.

*Cicada sampling is entirely optional and community-offered. Try any, all, or none, of the cicada preparations (max 2 cicadas per person per preparation), bring your favorite sauce, or harvest and cook your own after sampling hours. Please note that cicadas are closely related to shrimp and people with shellfish allergies may react to cicadas – you are responsible for what you choose to ingest!

The Green Farmacy Garden is located on a 6-acre plot, 3 acres of which are wooded. There’s plenty of space for children to play and discover, families to spread out with picnics, and groups to arrange themselves into jam sessions (feel free to bring instruments! ).

Masks covering mouth and nose, and physical distancing, are required for the entirety of this event, and attendance is limited to 75 ticket holders.

Child Policy:

  • No charge for children 5 years old and under
  • Free admission of one child aged 6+ per paid adult ticket
  • Ticket rate for additional children is $15, enter Code “CHILD” at purchase to access this rate.

Please join us in responsible consumption and minimizing waste at this event: please bring a full, refillable water vessel to stay hydrated during your visit, and an unbreakable bowl for your samples. Drinking water will be available onsite to fill your water bottle as needed.

We recommend attendees home-cook or buy, and bring the food you’ll need for the day – cicada samples will not constitute a meal! Maple Lawn (3-minutes’ drive from the site), offers a variety of eateries, as does Clarksville (9-minute drive).

This event will take place in any safe weather conditions.

Please Note: Depending on field conditions, parking availability may be up to half a mile’s walk from the festival site, so factor that in to your planning!

GET INVOLVED!

We can offer free admission to a number of volunteers willing to work a 3-hour shift. Positions available include parking attendant, admission, water tender, and more.

We can also accommodate additional vendors.

Email greenfarmacygarden@gmail.com to join the team!

Full details and registration at Eventbrite!

Banner cicada image by C. Simon

space

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment