Volunteer
Join Us for Dirt Days
Our next two Dirt Days will be August 21st and November 13th, 2022. Check here for future Dirt Days or contact our volunteer coordinators. We work on areas of the garden that need weeding or mulching, pruning or deadheading mother plants in pots or in the garden.
Volunteers also join our ongoing project of maintaining our small propagation nursery. Tasks include all aspects of producing young plants that go to our curators or are sold in our rose sales. The circle of jobs runs from cutting and prepping roses to be rooted in our mist tunnel to cleaning newly rooted small plants, organizing them on tables, labeling, weeding pots fertilizing and mulching, maintaining a tidy workplace.
We are encouraging potential volunteers to set up regular times that suit their schedule to help to maintain the nursery. Each volunteer is provided with training, and retraining by the curator and the volunteer coordinators. And we aim to make their time as independent as they feel comfortable with.
To volunteer, please contact the coordinators. Our space for parking is quite limited and each volunteer day has to be carefully planned ahead. All volunteer work takes place at the current site of the collection:
3003 Pleasant Hill Rd.
Sebastopol, CA 95472
We’ve had some fun working on the roses and met some lovely new volunteers this summer. But we recognize that the era of Covid is far from over, and the price of gas in California is making us all think twice about non-essential driving.
With that we are scaling back our Dirt Days for the rest of the year here at the Friends’ garden. We’ll have two work days through November, and two workshops on roses, Propagation and Care & Planting.
We’d love to see your faces at one of these events, and perhaps our final Dirt Day will be the first of many planting days to come. We hope to be ready to replant the old Damask Perpetual borders and the Tea rose beds with the Rose Walls of climbers by November this year!
We look forward to seeing you soon!
—Gregg, Jody, and Trang
Here is our schedule and we’ll email more details about Dirt Days and Workshops in August.
August 21, Sunday, 10 am thru 2 pm
Dirt Day (bring a bag lunch!)
September 4, Sunday 10 am to 2 pm
Workshop on Rose Propagation (bring a bag lunch!)
Free to Guardians of the Rose / $25 for non-guardians
October 23, Sunday 10 am to 2 pm
Workshop on Rose Care and Planting (bring a bag lunch)
Free to Guardians of the Rose / $25 for non-guardians
Please contact our team of volunteer coordinators — Jody Doss of Lagunitas and Trang Bui of Sebastopol — via email with questions: volunteercoordinator@thefriendsofvintageroses.org