$1,000 Green Grant Award goes to Downtown Greens
Congratulations to Downtown Greens in Fredericksburg, for their Community Beautification Green Grant award of $1,000! Their project plans include removing invasive species of plants, and adding native plants to attract pollinators, as well as growing produce for the local community.
Downtown Greens is a 2.78-acre greenspace founded in 1995 in the heart of downtown Fredericksburg, Virginia. Its mission is to foster community involvement and growth by protecting and nurturing urban greenspace through collaborative environmental stewardship and experiential education.
The greenspace is accessible to the community sunrise to sunset, 365 days a year. In addition to being an organically maintained urban oasis, Downtown Greens also provides important community programs. Downtown Greens established its first youth gardening program five years ago and since then, programming has expanded to include a Youth Farm Program, Head Start garden programs, summer camps, and adult and children programming centered on sustainable gardening.
Downtown Greens’ youth programs are aimed at providing educational opportunities to the area’s low-income students. A minimum of 75% of the after-school youth participants in Downtown Greens programs come from low-income households. In addition, Downtown Greens provides educational classes as part of the Head Start programs in the City of Fredericksburg and King George County that cover approximately 200 low-income students in fifteen classes.
The produce that is grown in the teaching garden is distributed to the participants of the program, where 95% of their 2019 participants resided in one of the two adjacent low income apartment complexes adjacent to the property, or to the local community through their newly constructed Free Fridge and pantry.
Known locally as Daffodil Hill, the hillside portion of Downtown Greens Upper Garden property is one of the southern entrances to downtown Fredericksburg. While daffodils bloom in the Spring, the area is overgrown with Lonicera (Japanese honeysuckle), Cynodon (bermuda grass), Ligustrum (Japanese Privet) and Pyrus ‘Bradford’ pear trees.
The purpose of the project is to remove invasive species, and to allow native species to thrive through encouraging the few existing native plants in the space to flourish and planting a summer meadow using restoration best practices from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation and The Nature Conservancy and meadow installation best practices from The Xerces Society. When the daffodils are no longer in bloom, a beautiful native meadow will bloom all summer long giving not only a beautiful entrance to Downtown Fredericksburg, but also providing a large area for pollinators and native birds. The Urban Meadow Rewild project will be an example of how to transform underutilized and difficult to maintain areas of a property to help declining insect populations using native plants and will be used as a teaching tool for their youth programs. The project effort will be led by Downtown Greens Garden Coordinator, Em Ford, who has a degree in Environmental Science
They are expecting to remove 8 Bradford Pear Trees and 96% of the total invasive plant species that are currently present. With funds provided by the Green Grant, they will plant 181 native plants consisting of 24 different species. These native species will consist of four types of Graminoids, 15 perennial flower species, three types of ferns, two shrubs/woody plants, and hundreds of native wildflower seeds to be broadcast. This would allow them to restore 2,930 square feet of land, with a perimeter of 334 feet. They anticipate about 140 volunteer hours to help restore the land through a combination of regular garden volunteer hours and special community-wide volunteer events.
We’re excited about what Downtown Greens is doing for the urban green space, and the benefit it will have on pollinators and wildlife. We can wait to see the project blossom!