At the end of Earth Week, celebrate your mother with a big bunch of posies. Not with formal hothouse flowers primped to last for weeks; to honor the Earth, you want flowers that grow wild and free. Right in your front yard.
At the Dandelion Festival April 24 in downtown Boulder, you can fete this flower and learn how to cultivate it for beauty, medicine and tasty food.
“When you look at the dandelion you appreciate what it represents. It’s a symbol of spring,” says event co-organizer Deb Sanders, “and when you throw it in a quiche it’s delicious.”
Dandelion will be dished up by festival sponsors and Boulder Farmer’s Market vendors, featuring pupusas, dandelion blossom fritters, cookies, and soda. As you munch, listen to acoustic music by Kimmerjae Johnson (she’s also a garden designer), Harper Phillips and Choosing June.
Short classes are scheduled throughout the day, focusing on sustainable lawn care or how to recognize the wild, edible plants in your yard.
Sponsored by the Citizens For Pesticide Reform, organizers call dandelions little sunshine sparkles in the lawn, a moniker not used by those who consider it their sworn enemy.
But “it’s a great disservice to view it as a useless weed,” says Brigitte Mars, herbalist and author of the Desktop Guide to Herbal Medicine, “these ‘weeds’ have been food and medicine for humans for thousands of years.”
Read more Carol O’Meara at her blog
If you go
What: Dandelion Festival
When: 9 a.m.-4 p.m. April 24
Where: The Bandshell, Broadway and Canyon, Boulder.
Highlights:
10-10:30 a.m.: Mikl Brawner from Harlequin’s Garden — “Gardening without Chemicals”
11- 11:30 a.m.: Rebecca Luna of Rebecca’s Apothecary — “Medicine Making with Local Plants”
Noon-12:45 p.m.: Bill Melvin of Ecoscape Environmental Design: “Fun with Permaculture”
1-1:45 p.m.: Brigitte Mars — “Wild, Edible, and Medicinal Weeds of Boulder”
2:45-3:15 p.m.: Tim Gilpin of Native Solutions — “Sustainable Lawn Care”
Info:
