Private Regional Group: Pacific West

A warm welcome to you Pacific West gardeners! 🌿

I am so excited to have this space to meet and share knowledge. My name is Jenn Rogge (rhymes with froggy), and I am your regional lead. I spent more than a decade as a pre-k-12 garden educator and my dream is to have a robust garden program in every school. I currently live in the beautiful mountains of far northern CA with my family, and I spend my time hiking, swimming, mountain biking and gardening. I'm here to help you navigate the networks, organizations, and resources available to you!

Please introduce yourself and your garden dreams in the comments. Are there any resources that you have found to be amazing? Knowledge that you would like to share? Queries for the group or problems the community can help you solve? Share your glows and grows with the group!

Hello Jenn and West Coast Gardeners!

I'm Kathryn Turner and I currently run a school garden in Mt. Baldy, CA. We are a very small one school district in the Eastern San Gabriel Mountains at 4000 ft elevation. I have been gardening or working on farms for 30 years and there is nothing that brings me more joy. I dream of one day connecting our school garden to our cafeteria. Due to the size and budget of our school, we do not have a certified kitchen. Instead I meet with each class and we plant, grow, harvest, and snack on our garden yields. It feels insurmountable to close the loop of growing food to making school lunches. We have had a bid on remodeling the kitchen to make it certified and it was about $1 million. I would love to hear any suggestions or ideas from this community. Thank you! I love learning from all of you.