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Be a Mentor to our New Gardeners!

Who is Edible Evanston?

Edible Evanston encourages Evanston residents to grow and share locally grown food.

We provide opportunities for individuals to expand their knowledge of nutrition, growing food, and composting and to experience the benefits of Evanston-raised produce for themselves.

What is the program about?

The Evanston Community Foundation awarded Edible Evanston a grant to help 20 families and organizations build new gardens in 2015–2016.

The program is about more than building gardens for people. It’s about ensuring success for new gardeners by providing continual guidance through a personal mentor and education. That’s where you can help!

In future years we hope to have our first crops of New Gardeners mature into mentors of the future.

Experienced vegetable gardeners wanted!

Whether you have been successfully vegetable gardening for just a few seasons, are a Master Gardener, or are someone with tons of experience growing food on a home-gardening scale, we hope you will join our network of mentors.

Be a personal garden mentor to help guide one of our New Gardeners through his or her first year of planting! Sign up today.

Make a difference in your neighborhood

We partner you with one or two people in your surrounding area who have joined the program. You help them select plants to grow, help plan their garden, teach about sowing, weeding, harvest, thinning, plant support and provide advice about watering. And you are their first go-to person when they have questions. How active you are depends on the needs of your assigned gardener(s) and how much time you have.

You become part of our network of mentors, so you always have others to turn to if you need more advice or another opinion. There is always more to know, and as with any type of teaching, it’s an opportunity to learn from both your "students" and your colleagues.

Not much time, but a lot of impact

We expect you to meet about once a month during the growing season and reply to the occassional email or phone call. Our mentors should reach out every few weeks or stop by and check out how things are progressing for his or her gardeners to catch small mistakes before they cause problems. Gardeners can journal online, so you can follow their progress and provide help if you desire.

You get to help novice gardeners succeed and they reap the rewards of the harvest!

How to apply:

Use the online application below and we will contact you once we select gardeners. Plan to attend a February 27, 2016 orientation meeting to meet your new mentee!

 

Edible Evanston Mentor Application

General Questions
Commitment and Availability Questions
Mentors are not required to help build the raised bed gardens, although we do encourage their participation. Plant selection, garden layout and seed sowing might take place the same day, depending on the season/weather. We assume all installations will be on weekends.
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