Please join us on November 1, 7:30 pm, Lakeside Room, Visitor Center, Chicago Botanic Garden, for a presentation given by Linda Lopata titled: The Top 10 Lessons I learned as a Gardener
Linda was first introduced to the pleasure of gardening by her British mother-in-law. Linda has been a volunteer in the fruit and vegetable garden at the Chicago Botanic for 15 years and has taken many classes there also.
Linda has a particular passion for growing vegetables. She used the 1st winter of the pandemic to expand her production from seed, growing over 1200 seedlings of vegetables and annuals in her basement. This past winter, she has been focusing on learning how to grow native plants by winter sowing and has been redesigning parts of her garden for them. Linda had 36 milk cartons for winter sowing this year. She loves the British cottage gardens style and much of her garden is modeled on them.
Linda has started an Instagram page @thelittlelittlefarm to share the tips and tricks that she has learned over the years. It also helps her keep track of her garden and what bloomed at different times.
Linda also has spent years refining methods of keeping track of her plants in her garden, how to maintain the plants and how to track her seed growing. She has gone from paper garden maps to electronic tracking of the information. Linda loves having all the details of her plants on her phone which she can easily pull up when working in the garden.
Linda is also the coordinator for the Deerfield hub of the Northshore Plant club (https://deerfield.northshoreplantclub.com/). The Northshore Plant Club allows customers to order plants online at close to wholesale prices. The plants are shipped direct from the nursery to a local hub for pick up.
Linda spent her career in information technology consulting, have two adult children, Alec and Amy, and live in Deerfield with her husband, Iain.
Gardeners of the North Shore 