WS Chronicle

By: Jess Schnur
The Chronicle

There was no better way to celebrate Earth Day last week than to get outside and get your hands dirty. But saving the planet takes more than just one day to make a difference; everybody possesses a responsibility to help keep their community, and therefore their planet beautiful and healthy for others to enjoy for generations to come.
Green thumbs across the community are encouraged to continually foster a cultivation of native, pollinator-friendly crops in gardens and patios and everyone can do their part to prevent litter while promoting recycling in their daily lives.
In Winston-Salem, organizations are helping provide opportunities and education to bring our community together and help make our county a cleaner and greener place for all.
Keep Winston-Salem Beautiful
Established in 1989 as a local branch of Keep America Beautiful, Keep Winston-Salem Beautiful (KWSB) is an improvement organization that hosts community cleanups and facilitates adoptions of local outdoor areas such as parks, streams or streets to promote their upkeep. Each year, the group hosts two major cleanup events: the Big Sweep each fall, and the Greatest American Cleanup in the spring. As it nears its end for the 2025 session, volunteers have collected 165 bags of trash this year. KWSB also helps to provide resources to residents looking to enact their own cleanups around town, with complimentary trash-hauling services available.
“We have been spending a lot of time at Rupert Bell Recreation Center. They have a stream bank there that people were using to dump building materials, so they’d fix up a house and then they’d back up their truck and just dump all the materials in there,” said Andy Szabat, KWSB executive director, in an interview with The Chronicle. “So, Rec and Parks went out and they picked up a bunch of the materials, and then we also had a group come out and we picked up 26 bags of trash, a bunch of building supplies, lumber, everything like that, in an area maybe half the size of a football field. And then we went back for the Greatest American Cleanup, we partnered with North Carolina Extension, and we planted the stream bank. And so, the hope is that if it’s a beautiful space, people are going to be less likely to litter, and then hopefully we’ll be able to get a fence out there as well.”
New Cardboard Boat Regatta on Saturday to Support Keep W-S Beautiful
KWSB will be hosting its first Cardboard Boat Regatta on Saturday, May 3, starting at 10 a.m. The event aims to promote recycling to reduce the amount of contamination within Winston-Salem’s recycling. Participants will build a boat out of cardboard, duct tape, and water-soluble paint to race across Winston Lake. There will be a handful of awards, from “The Titanic” award for the most epic sinking to the “Camel City” award. Everyone is invited to come out and cheer on these amazing creative individuals and teams!
Ways We All Can Help Keep W-S Beautiful
But there are many ways to keep our community beautiful outside of KWSB, emphasized Szabat. “Secure your load if you are driving a truck. A lot of trash falls off the truck, and you might not even know,” said Szabat. “And also, when you’re out and about and you have something to throw away, just hold on to it until you can get to a trash can or until you can get to the house. We have a lot of litter in Winston-Salem – it’s like food wrappers people are just throwing out of their car/ And what a lot of people don’t realize is the mosquitoes that we have here like to breed in litter. So, if you don’t like mosquitoes, you need to stop littering.”
More information about upcoming events and cleanups is available and updated via Facebook (Keep Winston-Salem Beautiful), Instagram (KWSBNC), or on their website.
NC Cooperative Extension and the Master Gardeners
The N.C. Cooperative Extension is a state-run partnership between N.C. State University and N.C. A&T University. With offices all over the state, here in Forsyth County, the Extension aims to educate community members about homeowners’ horticulture, such as home gardening, community gardening, lawns and landscapes. The group hosts educational lectures for both adults and the youth (this year, between 600-700 third-grade students attended their four-day hands-on program), educating attendees on topics such as soil, composting, carnivorous plants, and seeds.
“Gardening helps the environment, so if we’re planting things and we don’t have bare soil, it can help with stormwater issues. There’s a big movement to plant pollinator gardens and plant native plants, and that allows different insects and things that have lost habitat, because we have more and more houses going up. It allows them to have a place to go,” said Director of Tanglewood’s Arboretum and Extension Horticulture Agent Leslie Rose. “But I would also say there’s this whole community of people around gardening, and that’s one of the biggest things with our volunteer program, is it’s this group of like-minded people, and they become friends, and they share plants, and they hang out with each other, and it’s just a really great way to connect with other people in your community.”
The Extension also hosts the Master Gardener Volunteer program. As a certification program, the Master Gardeners must initially complete a 40-hour training course alongside a 40-hour volunteer internship and maintain their certification through a minimum of 20 volunteer hours and 10 education hours. These Master Gardeners work to share their knowledge and passion for planting with members of the community, such as attending the local Cobblestone Market and the Fairgrounds Farmer’s Market once a month.
One Master Gardener, Teresa Lowry, has completed over 2,300 hours through the organization. Born into gardening from a family of nature-lovers, Lowry worked in marketing for outdoor power equipment for 35 years. “Nature and the outdoors ran through my veins,” said Lowry in an interview with The Chronicle. She currently uses her experience in her work with the Extension, helping with brochures, newsletters, and PR for spring and fall plant sales since 2013.
“From growing annuals in the nursery to digging perennials from our yard and potting them to sell to the public, to handling the publicity to communicate the sale, and selling face to face during the sale,” said Lowry, “that is the FUN part of being a Master Gardener.” As the curator of Tanglewood’s Formal Garden, Lowry’s expertise in flora and fauna allows her to oversee the maintenance, design and budgeting of the space.
The Master Gardeners and the Extension held their annual spring plant sale this past Friday, May 2, at the Tanglewood Arboretum. Proceeds from sales go toward projects at Tanglewood, such as supplementing tools, fertilizers, trees and plants for the Arboretum, benefiting the adult education classes on the premises. Previously, proceeds helped implement a wrought-iron 8-foot-tall deer fence to help prevent wildlife from “using the Arboretum as a smorgasbord buffet,” according to Lowry.
Brown and Douglas Community Garden
At the Brown and Douglas Neighborhood Center, many members are doing their part through the two community garden programs offered by the facility. One program is run exclusively by the Center at the Stonewall Neighborhood Garden to provide members with the produce grown from their garden. The other in partnership with the Forsyth County Health Department is a series of raised beds on the Center’s premises.
Through their partnership with the Health Department, the gardening program helps to combat hunger within our community. Winston-Salem is home to 21 food deserts, which places the city seventh on the national list for food hardship. Crops raised through this program help provide food to small local grocery stores, allowing access to free nutritious food for residents in these deserts.
“We were really excited when we were approached about doing the program with the Health Department because it was twofold,” explained Serena Mumford, the rec center supervisor. “It allows us to have our adult program participants who have some mobility limitations to get involved, and the ones who don’t have their own transportation can get involved with that, too. And then we were very, very happy to be able to grow something that will give back to people in need.”
These gardening programs are not only helping others on a broader scale, but are also helping members to help themselves, as well. As an Active Adult Center, the Brown and Douglas Center has provided its members with access to brain health programs through Wake Forest University’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Unit and Research Center. Staying active through activities such as gardening, as well as supplementing nutritious food into one’s diet, can vastly improve brain health.
Personal Connections Made Through Gardening
But the most impactful way these gardens have touched members is through the personal connections made along the way. One member of the center shared how, through gardening, she remained connected to the important people in her life. Her love for planting vegetables stemmed from her father, who brought her and her siblings together to form an assembly line in planting seeds in their garden to grow food for their family. “You don’t realize how important moments like these are to bring you together with your family until they’re gone,” she had explained.
Her love of gardening also brought her and her late husband together, as the dynamic duo meticulously planned and cultivated intricate flower and vegetable arrangements in their yard. Because of her fear of worms, her husband happily took on the dirty work, but after his passing, she explained how not even worms will keep her from coming back to the garden. “It’s through gardening that I feel connected to him still the most,” she said.
Small Actions Make a Big Difference
Helping the planet doesn’t necessarily require volunteer status or qualifying certifications; everyone possesses the capabilities to enact change. No matter how “small” a task may seem, says Anika Parks, the volunteer coordinator of Forsyth County, all actions can make a huge impact.
There are many events hosted throughout the county that are accessible to all, such as the annual Creek Week every March, to educate and maintain local waterways, to the Greatest Southeast Pollinator Census, a citizen science opportunity to help track which plants attract different pollinators. However, making a difference can even be as close as your backyard, or as simple as shopping for local produce.
“When we garden, it helps our neighborhoods and our communities. When we’re increasing the variety of plants, when more people are planting gardens, or putting them in containers on your porch, and especially when we couple that with decreasing the use of pesticides and insecticides and herbicides, we just in general see more wildlife thriving, especially maybe in our more or less developed parts of our community,” said Parks.
“But even a garden in the heart of the city has an impact throughout the rest of the county, throughout the rest of the state, our country. It multiplies and it increases its impact. When we grow food, whether that’s food that we’re growing in our backyard, in a community garden, or in our larger fields or commercial fields, we have to have those insects and those birds and that wildlife to pollinate them, to increase them, to make them better quality, increase the nutritional value of it, and so just doing something small has a very large impact all the way out to our large commercial fields that feed our country.”
Gardening, emphasizes Parks, is also incredible for mental health and bringing people together within the local community. For those without a yard or space to plant their own garden, there are community gardens across the county; some in conjunction with food banks to help feed those in need around the community, schools to help educate and excite the youth about the world around them, or even plot-based neighborhood gardens to help neighbors share crops and come together.
But even for those who can’t get their hands dirty, there are still ways to contribute. Shopping and supporting local farmers and craftsmen via farmers markets, keeping small plants such as herbs in indoor spaces, and composting – whether done individually or outsourcing food scraps to local farmers (such as at the Cobblestone Farmers Market) – can all play a part in reducing waste and supporting the cause to build a better environment.
“When you make that commitment to make one small change, it’s very easy for it to snowball into another small thing, and another small thing, and then all of a sudden, you may be able to look back and see the larger impact it’s had,” concluded Parks. “Just because you’re taking one small thing doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a large impact; because if all of us take one small step, that’s a very, very large difference that we get to start making in our neighborhood, in our community, and just making everything just a little bit better.”
For those looking for events to participate in within their community, upcoming events and news can be found at go.ncsu.edu/ForsythEventbrite. To learn more about community gardens near you, volunteering at community gardens, or to seek information about resources and means to establish a community garden, contact Matthew Scoggins, the community garden coordinator, at 336-703-2850.