Meet the winners of the 2022 Dispatch Backyard Garden Awards

You might simply call Tricia Brown’s backyard garden the bee’s knees.

The Lancaster resident’s organic and natural vegetable backyard is stuffed with a mix of crops, herbs and flowers created to draw pollinating bees. The bucolic house was named Ideal of Exhibit in this year’s Dispatch Yard Back garden Awards.

“I was aiming just to get into the pageant,” explained Brown, 57, who entered the contest very last 12 months. “I wasn’t expecting the Best of Exhibit.”

The honor was introduced Sept. 10, for the duration of the Slide Dispatch Household & Garden Display. The fifth edition of the celebration also acknowledged gardens in the types of landscape, native vegetation, perennials, community yard, vegetable and container. A People’s Decision prize was also provided.

PEOPLE'S CHOICE
Kay Hoagland and the Saint Andrew Christian Church community garden in Dublin.
Gardeners' comments: The Saint Andrew Christian Church community garden strives to annually donate between 700 and 1,000 pounds of fresh and organic produce to the Help My Neighbor Food Bank. The photo shows our harvest in mid-July that included white and purple potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, zucchini, turnips with tops, white and red onions. Future harvests will include carrots and beets with tops. Both the church and the food bank are located on Smoky Row Road in Dublin, so we are really helping our neighbors with healthy food security.

The Dispatch provides the function in collaboration with Oakland Nurseries, AgPro and the At Residence portion, and learn gardeners from OSU Extension choose the winning gardens from the entries.

Brown, 57, was encouraged to create her backyard in 2019 when, immediately after a lot of many years of renting residences and tending to gardens at every, she and her spouse, Thomas Rhyne, purchased a property of their personal.

“I couldn’t hold out to get my initially garden,” Brown mentioned. “I most likely invested 20 a long time on paper just creating this yard (and) ready until a time that I could put it in.”

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The pandemic gave Brown a probability to concentration on her burgeoning back garden, which contains 70 kinds of vegetables, fruits, herbs and bouquets Brown is notably proud of her Persian cucumbers, Mini Adore watermelons and Bristol black raspberries, the previous of which remind her of her childhood on a southeastern Ohio farm.

“I want anyone to go in the back garden gate and be in a position to just variety of wander through and see all sorts of exciting issues,” Brown stated.

Of exclusive worth to Brown was making certain her yard was buzz-deserving: Yrs ago, she had found that she experienced been observing much less and less bees when she was out and about, so she took a number of methods to make sure her have backyard garden was eye-catching to bees.

For case in point, bouquets that bloom in purple had been preferred.

“I read that the honeybees are attracted to purple,” claimed Brown, who also certain that drinking water functions, these as bowls, were being shallow so that the bees would not drown.

As for the 26 kinds of herbs in her backyard, Brown mentioned, “I method them early in the spring, early summer months, and then allow them expand to keep the flowering, which genuinely draws (the bees).”

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Brown does not use pesticides, and she attempts to “plant in harmony.”

“There’s a enormous walnut tree not significantly away,” she said. “Because a whole lot of veggies really do not like walnuts, I had to be really very careful how I planted them.”

And the bees are not the only types who enjoy the gardener’s attempts.

“It’s my satisfied spot,” Brown stated of her winning garden.

People’s Alternative Award

The People’s Preference prize went to a incredibly specific sort of backyard: the group garden of Saint Andrew Christian Church in Dublin.

The church has maintained a yard for additional than two a long time: The produce it creates is harvested for the Aid My Neighbors Food stuff Pantry.

For the past four decades, church member Kay Hoagland of Dublin has taken the lead in preserving the back garden, which, this year, is on keep track of to donate about 1,000 lbs of make.

“I’ve gardened just about all of my grownup daily life, and my dad and mom have been gardeners and my grandparents,” explained Hoagland, 75. “It’s something that I have normally completed and normally appreciated, and the ideal detail to do is to use your abilities to enable others.”

About 10 persons from the church perform on the backyard garden in addition to Hoagland because the area isn’t surrounded by a fence, they stay away from planting items likely to bring in rabbits or deer.

“We never plant lettuce and spinach,” Hoagland reported, but white and purple potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers and eco-friendly peppers, among the others, have all been harvested this yr.

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Hoagland and the other volunteers solicit suggestions from individuals who use the food items pantry.

“I question at the food lender, . . . ‘We introduced you a ton of cucumbers. Is that well-known? Do men and women like that? Need to we plant them up coming 12 months?’” she explained.

Eggplant is common, she claimed, as a vegetarian substitute.

For the duration of the pandemic, those people who worked in the back garden identified the activity a wonderful way to be alongside one another and be outdoor.

“We would convey a lunch and sit outdoors and take in,” Hoagland explained. “It was a actually terrific social action for us during COVID.”

The most vital detail, though, is all those whom the back garden serves.

“The truth that we are donating this foods lets people today to have refreshing fruits and veggies as opposed to canned items,” Hoagland mentioned. “There is a big difference there.”

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