Taught from indigenous traditions as well as native ecology management techniques,  The GardenWorks Project is proud to host a workshop about Native Gardening. In this online workshop, learn to maximize results in your garden through intentional native design, plant selection, and restorative techniques.

This January, we invite you to join The GardenWorks Food Readers Book Club's first 2022 in-person event of the year! We will gather to discuss The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr, a fascinating investigation into the human lives at the heart of the American grocery store. 

What does it take to run the American supermarket? How do products get to shelves? Who sets the price? And who suffers the consequences of increased convenience end efficiency? In this alarming exposé, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry. Combining deep sourcing, immersive reporting, and compulsively readable prose, Lorr leads a wild investigation, and the result is a page-turning portrait of an industry in flux, filled with the passion, ingenuity, and exploitation required to make this everyday miracle continue to function. The product of five years of research and hundreds of interviews across every level of the industry, The Secret Life of Groceries delivers powerful social commentary on the inherently American quest for more and the social costs therein.

We invite you to join The GardenWorks Food Readers Book Club's April gathering. We will discuss Queen Sugar: A Novel by Natalie Baszile. 

Readers, booksellers, and critics alike are embracing Queen Sugar and cheering for its heroine, Charley Bordelon, an African American woman and single mother struggling to build a new life amid the complexities of the contemporary South.

We invite you to join The GardenWorks Food Readers Book Club's summer community garden gathering. We will discuss Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan and enjoy a garden tour during your visit. Join us with this critically acclaimed, Scholastic Gold young adult novel, appropriate for ages 8 and up. The discussion will be appropriate for both adults and children. Available also in Spanish.

Esperanza thought she'd always live a privileged life on her family's ranch in Mexico. She'd always have fancy dresses, a beautiful home filled with servants, and Mama, Papa, and Abuelita to care for her. But a sudden tragedy forces Esperanza and Mama to flee to California and settle in a Mexican farm labor camp. Esperanza isn't ready for the hard work, financial struggles brought on by the Great Depression, or lack of acceptance she now faces. When Mama gets sick and a strike for better working conditions threatens to uproot their new life, Esperanza must find a way to rise above her difficult circumstances-because Mama's life, and her own, depend on it.

We invite you to join The GardenWorks Food Readers Book Club's fall gathering. We will discuss Dirt to Soil: One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture by Gabe Brown. 

In Dirt to Soil Gabe Brown tells the story of that amazing journey and offers a wealth of innovative solutions to restoring the soil by laying out and explaining his “five principles of soil health,” which are:

• Limited Disturbance
• Armor
• Diversity
• Living Roots
• Integrated Animals

The Brown’s Ranch model, developed over twenty years of experimentation and refinement, focuses on regenerating resources by continuously enhancing the living biology in the soil. Using regenerative agricultural principles, Brown’s Ranch has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years!

Find out more and discover as a community different ways our western Chicagoland region can engage in this important topic of earth stewardship.