Gardens that grow food as well as flowers are a delight that Camden offers in an amazing and amazingly beautiful array of shapes and sizes. Kale growing up amid flowers under a peach tree on a tiny front patch. Lemony sorrel sharing space with a conventional rose bush on one side and a raspberry plant on the other. An elaborate selection of “all-native” plants in a sizable side-yard. All are on view in Camden for those who know where to look.
You could plant and tend some or all of them yourself. As food writer and historian, cook, and Camden native and returnee Nancy Harmon Jenkins wrote in a recent lyrical ode to gardens in her “On the Kitchen Porch”blog: “It really doesn’t take much to start a garden, it doesn’t take much to grow a little food. Soil, sun, and water are what’s needed. That and some hard work, a little advance prep, and a willing heart.”
As an alternative for those without time or inclination to take on growing food themselves – or as a first bit of “advance prep” for food gardening next year — events are springing up all over that allow us to experience food gardens in a way that, until recently, we could only experience flowers, bushes, and trees at the Camden Garden Club’s Annual Garden Tour. For decades, that tour provided much of the funding for the club.
This year the Camden Garden Club is instead organizing an inaugural Garden Expoon Thursday, July 17. It promises to be quite the event. Titled “Edible Gardens and Bountiful Tables,” the Expo will start at 9 am at the Camden Middle School and feature talks by two nationally famous food writers, Barbara Damrosch of Four Season Farm in Harborside and the self-same Nancy Jenkins quoted above. It will end with a “micro-farm tour” at David Kibbe’s Old Souls Farm just off Chestnut Street.
In between will be short talks by local farmers and restauranteurs and break-out sessions on soil quality, making sauces with garden herbs, planning a kitchen garden, and making bouquets with flowers and veggies combined. In addition, the Middle School portion will showcase “bountiful tablescapes” around specific themes and varying from “rustic to whimsical.”
A ticket is required, and there’s a $40 fee. That may sound like a lot to some, but remember that this is meant to provide much of this year’s funding for the Camden Garden Club, which for 110 years has helped make our streets and town properties appealing by planting flowers and street trees, and organizing flower baskets and wreaths.
The garden club also makes an annual “pledge to protect and conserve the natural resources of the planet earth and promise to promote education so we may become caretakers of our air, water, forest and wildlife.”
CamdenCAN’s Food Garden Tours
CamdenCAN itself helped get the food-garden ball rolling in Camden last summer with its support for a first, imaginatively organized Camden Food Garden Tour. A second is planned for this harvest season. Some of the gardens will be open on Friday, Sep. 5, and others on Sunday, Sep. 7. It will include a mix of home gardens, family farms, and community plots.
The Tour is free, but requires advance registration in order to get garden addresses and times, which appear on an interactive map (desktop), or list (tablet /phone).
As Molly Mulhern explained in this newsletter last year, CamdenCAN sees both need for and benefit from people growing a part of their own food in this time of climate instability. That’s why we’re so pleased to see local organizations moving in this direction. Here’s how she put it:
“Growing food is getting harder around the world. The droughts, deluges, whiplash temperatures, high winds, all are causing crop failures. Locally, regionally and world wide. Commercial and peasant farmers alike, around the world, are often struggling and even failing.
The cost of food is beginning to show the effects. If we learn to grow even small amounts of our own food, we will be able to help. But we need time to learn and achieve these skills, especially as we must adapt to the changing and less predictable weather.”
Camden/Rockport Climate Action RFQ
Camden and Rockport are jumping full speed ahead into the joint neighbor-to-neighbor Energy Coaching and separate Emergency Preparedness Outreach programs for which the Rockport Conservation Commission, CamdenCAN, and the towns of Rockport and Camden recently received a two-year Community Action Grantfrom the Maine Community Resilience Partnership.
The Town of Rockport will soon be formally seeking applications for a paid, part-time position as Project Manager, to oversee the day-to-day operations of Energy Coaching and also provide minor assistance on the Emergency Preparedness Outreach portion of the grant. The contract will be for two years. A Request for Qualifications (RFQ) should appear soon on Rockport’s website . If you can’t locate the RFQ, please contact CamdenCAN2025@gmail.com.