Gardening and Landscape Volunteers

Our Mission statement

From one view our group's purpose is simply to enjoy gardening by communally cultivating the church grounds. Yet in doing so, we also take the opportunity to share our talents and gifts in service to our community, we enable St. Dominic's Parish to reserve its financial gifts for more urgent needs or for charity, we act as caring stewards of God's blessed Creation, and moreover, we collaboratively accomplish a wonderful thing. Little by little our joint efforts transform our challenging grounds into an inspiring metaphor for our parish as richly diverse, harmonious, ordered, blossoming, and Spirit-filled! In keeping with thoughtful stewardship, we strive to use holistic organic gardening techniques. This method is non-toxic, environmentally-kind, resource efficient, and cooperates with the local ecology by cultivating a small ecosystem, an intricate web of life.

About Our Group

Most of us are amateur gardeners humbly learning as we go. We gather the third saturday of every month from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm, unless there's a parish assembly. Typically we groom, prune, weed, compost, water, and occasionally we divide and plant. We are always working on new garden projects! Sometimes we all go out for lunch after gardening. We have a new collaborative steering committee to direct our efforts to renovate the garden! Frank Yee, Michele de Jesus, Andrew Martinez-Fonts, and Peter Mandell will cooperate, along with Fr. Xavier, to procure tools, procure plants, fund group projects, and encourage new volunteers! Donations of high quality tools or plants (which meet our new garden design goals) are greatly appreciated! At times, we could use help with a project so let us know if you'd like to be more involved! We are really grateful for all our past volunteers, especially our regulars! Thank you! And new volunteers of any age are welcome anytime! Bring your gardening gloves!

New Goals for the Garden

Our steering committee has been busy making the arrangements necessary such that our group can really progress on our mission statement! The trickier parts of our mission involve the actual setting up of a more manageable, resource-efficient, and harmoniously-ordered garden design. This new design will incorporate irrigation, composting, mulching, and replanting. Yet its the regular cultivation by our caring volunteers that will keep the garden growing strong!

To Learn More About Gardening

There are many ways to learn more about gardening! As gardeners of community we partake in the mission of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG). Several of their instructive gardening brochures are in our Garden Notebook for you to look at, or request a copy of. The Garden Notebook, our field reference, also includes a visual plant identification inventory and care guide. We greatly encourage our volunteers to take the various Saturday gardening classes offered at SLUG's thriving demonstration garden, Garden for the Environment, at 7th Ave. at Lawton. Their community educators are great! Fr. Xavier is willing to sponsor committed gardening group volunteers for SLUG classes. If you have a particular gardening question Michele will gladly see if she can provide information from her resources by our next gathering. And for our really earnest gardeners we recommend you get a good gardening book, especially one that includes current organic techniques. The Borders at Stonestown usually has a good selection. And check out Strybing Arboretum & Botanical Gardens in Golden Gate Park which both is a thriving model, and also has an excellent gardening library. Entry is free; call 661-1316 for more info.

Get Involved!

We always welcome new gardeners to our group -- no experience necessary! Contact Michele at 359-1462, or micheledejesus@earthlink.net for more information.