Category: Collaboration

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The Hummingbird Garden at Oak Creek

Summer Retrospective Part 1

By Sarah Bronstein, Casey Colley, Kathleen Dennis, and Xia Lu

Oak Creek Center for Urban Horticulture (OCCUH) is a learning laboratory for sustainable horticultural practices in both rural and peri-urban landscapes. Its 6.5 acres on the SW corner of campus house formal and informal OSU research, riparian restoration, a student CSA program, as well as just plain fun.  

This past summer, OCCUH invited OSU Extension Master Gardener (MG) trainees to work on a pilot project renovating and planting beds on the grounds. Kathleen Dennis, the on-site project lead, guided the MG volunteers.

Together, the group:

  • Weeded, mulched, and added native wildflowers to an upland prairie area
  • Renovated a high-profile woody hedgerow
  • Planted a small hummingbird garden

There is an inviting walkway between the greenhouses and OCCUH’s rock and water feature known as the “vernal pool”. MG trainees Casey Colley and Xia Lu used a mix of veggie and flower starts to transform the space into a low-profile garden to accent this pool. Native clarkia, Oregon sunshine were still going strong midsummer. Colley and Lu chose plants that were great for attracting pollinators, including

  • Ornamental sage  
  • Hot peppers
  • Sunflowers 
  • Tithonia 
  • Lagos spinach (Celosia argentea)
  • Beans
  • Basil
  • And several other herbs

They packed in so many colorful salvias that the garden became a hummingbird flyway. 

When the collaboration began, the little flowerbed was an open slate.

Later, Colley direct-sowed buckwheat between plants as a nitrogen fixer. This amazing mid-season cover crop is lovely in its own right, and can reach maturity in 45 days!  It lends itself to successive sowing from April to late September. When Lu and Colley thinned the mature buckwheat in September, the soil beneath each plant was the consistency of wet coffee grounds!

The season was a success! The hummingbird garden created a variety of textures, colors, and scents. It sustained lots of pollinating insects and kept Oak Creek’s resident hummingbirds happy. 

OCCUH’s mission is to utilize open expanses in a more coherent urban-based fashion. Urban Meadows, Green Roofs, pollinator space and urban wildlife habitats are all on the drawing board. The Center is always looking for volunteers to help with projects.

We hope gardeners are inspired by these summer memories as they plan gardens for the new growing season.

Master Gardeners interested in helping out on garden projects are encouraged to reach out to Elizabeth Records at [elizabeth.records@oregonstate.edu.

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Seed Library Coming to Corvallis 

A person holds a selection of seed packets. Credit: urbancow, Getty Images

The Public Seed Library is a new collaborative project of the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition, with the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library serving as the host partner and the OSU Extension Master Gardener Program providing educational resources. The free, volunteer-run Public Seed Library is expected to open at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library downtown by March ’23. 

“This is a natural opportunity to collaborate to benefit so many, so easily!” said Jill Farrow, who is a member of both organizations. “The Corvallis Sustainability Coalition’s Food Action Team puts on the free Edible Garden Tour each year to increase local food consumption and support home gardening. The Benton County Master Gardeners provide many educational resources for gardening. The new Public Seed Library leverages the strengths of these two community volunteer organizations.”  

This will be a seed-sharing library to share sustenance: Give what you can, and receive seeds and garden knowledge on how to plan a garden, grow vegetables, and companion herbs and flowers too for pollinators and other beneficial insects. 

The Corvallis Sustainability Coalition is looking for volunteers to collect donated seeds, then help organize and inventory seed packets to stock the new Public Seed Library. If you’re an individual interested in volunteering, or a company interested in making a tax-deductible donation of commercial seed packets, reach out to connect with the Food Action Team now here. 

As the educational partner, Benton County Master Gardeners will offer vegetable garden planning and growing lectures, as well as staff pop-up Plant Clinic help desks at the Corvallis Public Library next spring and summer. The Public Seed Library will be available to everyone who visits the Corvallis Public Library, for their personal use, regardless of whether they have a library card. It’s intended to support new and experienced home gardeners too.  

These local organizations already partner with others to provide the free Corvallis Garden Resource Guide and gardening educational outreach through the Neighborhood Planters Kiosks project. Corvallis has an active gardening community and three family-owned retail nurseries that support local school gardens, community gardening, and natural area conservation groups. There’s a lot of programming support for people who are looking to start gardening or grow more of their own food. “The Public Seed Library will benefit all: current gardeners who will have free access to a broader variety of seeds, new gardeners, and the environment too,” Farrow says. 

The Public Seed Library will be stocked exclusively with donated vegetable, herb, and flower commercial seed packets “Packed for 2022.” Please consider donating new or open and partially used seed packets if you’re a home gardener who has left over commercial seed packets “Packed for 2022”. Donations from the general public will be collected from mid-December through January ’23 at two drop-off donation sites: 

  • Benton County Master Gardener’s OSU Extension Office at 4077 SW Research Way 
  • Corvallis Public Library downtown at 645 NW Monroe Ave inside at the Librarian’s Desk 

Look for future updates on the Public Seed Library project on the Benton County Master Gardener and Corvallis Sustainability Coalition’s Food Action Team websites, also a new Instagram account, coming soon. For questions about the project, contact the Food Action Team here.