16 Tuesday Oct 2018
Posted in AFRH Garden
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Friends of the Soldiers Home garden volunteers have completed this season’s third and final batch of flower bouquets for the Armed Forces Retirement Home-DC cafeteria. The flowers look great! We’re grateful to volunteers Linda Cotton, Carol Herwig and Susan Minnemeyer, who grew and tended the flowers throughout the season. Thank you gardeners for bringing additional beauty to a Home of beautiful residents!
29 Sunday Jul 2018
Posted in AFRH Garden, Sports & Recreation
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Friends of the Soldiers Home volunteer gardeners recently had an opportunity to share the bounty of the gardens with residents of the Home. They brightened up the AFRH canteen and cafeteria with bouquets of fresh flowers grown by the volunteers. There are more flowers yet to bloom and more bouquets will be coming to the Home later this summer. Pictured below with some of the bouquets is volunteer gardener Susan Minnemeyer.
Photos courtesy of Sarah Clinehens.
15 Tuesday May 2018
Posted in AFRH Garden, Volunteering
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Volunteers are the Heart of FOSH! For the month of May, we’re sending out special thanks to FOSH garden volunteer, Carol Herwig. Carol puts her gardening know-how to use in many ways for residents of Armed Forces Retirement Home-Washington. She’s growing flowers for beautiful bouquets in the residents’ cafeteria and will be leading horticultural tours for residents around the campus. Carol also volunteers for Casey Trees and has organized tree plantings resulting in 300 young trees on the campus. Thank you Carol!
27 Tuesday Feb 2018
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The Community-Resident Garden at the Armed Forces Retirement Home (AFRH) has garden space available!
The garden provides AFRH Residents and individuals from the surrounding neighborhoods an opportunity to garden, build friendships, and have fun. The Friends of the Soldiers Home manages the garden in partnership with the AFRH.
Joining the garden entails a volunteer commitment of two hours per month and annual dues of $25 for a 200 square foot plot or $35 for 400 square feet (for experienced gardeners, subject to availability). Plots are for growing annual flowers and vegetables for household use.
Volunteer duties include helping AFRH Residents to garden and helping with events for the Residents as well as mowing, weeding, and mulching the common areas of the garden.
For more information contact Sarah Bohl at sarahtrelle(at)gmail(dot)com
25 Tuesday Jul 2017
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This summer, Friends of the Soldiers Home is having several events to “bring the garden to the residents” so that more folks can enjoy the beautiful flowers produced on campus. We kicked things off with a flower bouquet making event on a Saturday earlier this month. We brought large buckets of gorgeous flowers to work with, all grown at the garden or at gardeners’ homes. One resident lit up with joy when seeing the gladiolus – he told us about his wife who was a passionate gardener during her life and grew many of that type of flower.
A few residents stopped in for the event, but we reached many more when we placed the bouquets on tables in the dining hall during lunch and in the coffee area. The fresh flowers were met with smiles and words of thanks. Volunteers Linda Cotton and Sarah Clinehens put on the event, and the flowers were contributed by Carol and George Herwig, Susan Minnemeyer, Linda Cotton, Sarah Clinehens and Scot Bohl. Next up will be a tomato tasting and a repeat of the fresh flower bouquet give-away scheduled for Saturday, August 19th.
Friends of the Soldiers Home operates the volunteer garden program so that residents of Armed Forces Retirement Home-Washington have an opportunity to grow things on campus without doing too much of the heavy lifting.
Story and photos by Sarah Clinehens.
04 Tuesday Apr 2017
Posted in AFRH Garden, Volunteering
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Gardening at the old Soldiers’ Home.
Love to garden and volunteer?
The Community-Resident Garden at the Armed Forces Retirement Home (AFRH) has garden space available!
The garden provides AFRH Residents and individuals from the surrounding neighborhoods an opportunity to garden, build friendships, and have fun. The Friends of the Soldiers Home manages the garden in partnership with the AFRH.
Joining the garden entails a volunteer commitment of four hours per month and annual dues of $25. Volunteer duties include mowing the common areas of the garden and helping Residents to plant and weed their gardens.
Community garden plots for new gardeners in 2017 are about 15 feet by 30 feet and are available for growing vegetables and flowers for family and friends (not for commercial use).
Come join us!
For more information contact Sarah Bohl at sarahtrelle(at)gmail(dot)com
31 Friday Jul 2015
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Tomatoes, beans, peanuts, eggplants, corn — these items from the Armed Forces Retirement Home-DC gardens are delicious and nutritious. Not every tomato is perfect, but they’re still tasty. Now in its fifth year, the gardening partnership of Home residents and volunteers from Friends of the Soldiers Home is the centerpiece for a relaxing time in a hectic city. Vegetables in more than 25 plots push through the long hot days of summer with the help of over 50 volunteers. Garden socials offer opportunities to serve beer and grilled food, and to swap tales. Residents bring their coolers filled with bubbly treats. Recent incessant rains has everything in the gardens spiraling skyward, including the weeds. Swallows nesting in Matthew’s new birdhouses flit above everyone’s heads, making tasty morsels of mosquitoes and other pesky garden critters. Michael, Enid, Casey and others carefully tend to Roger’s row of flowers. Kelly’s stewardship of the cut flower bed is rewarding us with yellows, purples, and reds. Good times are ahead too — the cool growing weather is just two months away.
Story and photos by Ken Rubotzky.
18 Thursday Jun 2015
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The second garden social for residents and volunteers in the green oasis of the Soldiers’ Home occurred last weekend. The socials occur once a month and often feature recently harvested crops. Hot temperatures threatened attendance but a constant breeze and the shade of big trees provided respite. A new activity of sketching and identifying common weeds became the focus of this social. 2015’s growing season has drawn in new faces, young and old.
(Catching up on the news.)
(Corn growing.)
(Kids dive in.)
(Relaxing under shady trees.)
12 Tuesday Aug 2014
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Armed Forces Retirement Home-DC gardeners recently got together with Friends of the Soldiers Home volunteers for a spectacular picnic. We had corn, cucumbers and ripened tomatoes grown through the Friends-AFRH garden project at the picnic tables. The event encouraged numerous new veteran faces to come down for the comfortable breeze and cold beverages. Gardening and non-gardening residents snatched spots with a neighborhood view under breezy trees in chairs and picnic tables. AFRH Garden Director Lori Thompson brought all the vital vittles and fire making to ensure a successful BBQ. Garden volunteers like Ellen Hughes helped with cooking, kindly purchased drinks and helped serve. The garden of AFRH resident Terry supplied all of the corn and then some. Terry has some popcorn on the way. Maybe we’ll have some homegrown, homemade popcorn at the next social! Story and photos by Ken Rubotzky.
14 Wednesday May 2014
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Story and photos by Ken Rubotzky
The Soldiers Home Garden Project, a partnership of Friends of the Soldiers Home and the Armed Forces Retirement Home, is off to a strong start. This spring the program has grown, with 45 community volunteers joining 15 veteran residents in tending plots on the lower grounds of the beautiful Soldiers Home campus. This is the third year of the program, which has spawned friendships and helped bring veterans back to gardening because they have helpers for some of the heavy lifting.
The 2014 growing season is off to a wet and muddy start. Deer fences are sprouting up, and discussions about tomato varieties are ensuing. Two rows of garden space are visible from Rock Creek Church Road and Park Place Northwest. They will be the source of many vegetables and fruits that make it to the homes of volunteers and residents, and possibly visitors, during the numerous upcoming events in 2014.
This year amaranth and echinacea have made it into the May planting. If you go all the way to the end of the B section, and talk to the perspiring owner of one of the last garden plots, you might fear for your life. He has excavated several deep pits and is excited about planting three sisters. The sisters are companion plants, of course — beans, melons and corn.
Several social events, some more fun than work and others more work than fun, transpired between bouts of April showers. The first event involved working out the kinks of equipment repair and fencing. Another was a meeting of minds of old gardeners. The third involved cleanup, and the most recent session was an informal social where new pairings of volunteers and residents put down some roots. Events are planned for each month while the weeds and deer attempt to secure their share of the gardens.
It should be a good season.
Friends of the Soldiers Home 