November 11, 2019

Meet Kelly Beth Dygulski

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelly Beth Dygulski.

Kelly, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I have always had a fondness for plants.

In third grade, our teacher assigned us what was supposed to be a simple activity to draw and describe a habitat for an animal of your choosing. Before the internet, we used encyclopedias.

I remember sitting at my desk completely enraptured by the color photographs of tropical plants with their Latin name and description of habitat. I started feverishly copying down the names of all these beautiful plants and drawing them onto my paper. I still remember the exact elated feeling of discovery. My teacher made his round to my desk and asked which animal I chose.

Oh. An animal. Uhm…. a panda. he’s… in the bamboo!

Thank you, encyclopedia.

Thank you, plants. You are my new favorite thing, ever.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I stared at this question the longest. Not at the consideration of smooth vs bumpy or struggle vs skippity-do, but at the road itself. If I’m on a road we are all in danger!

Every day, my goal is to rise before the sun, to nourish my children and to nourish, to love my children and to love, and to preserve for my children and to preserve.

Our collective soil is our children’s land. Tiny hands which trust you to care for them, rely on you to provide for them. My two children (4 and 6.5) both grew up in our community garden.

Harvesting, eating, planting. Noticing growth, noticing seasons.

Learning about our soil. Sitting in, on and under that soil. Digging to unearth rocks, bugs, roots, broken china.

I have been completely immersed in the community garden since my husband and I moved to Golden from Nederland seven years ago. Gardening while wearing my newborn in a wrap, meeting other new moms who were also gardeners and watching our children take their first steps, so small amongst the zinnias and sunflowers. Getting to know other people in our community, really, truly learning about what it means to be a community. Yes, we can all live somewhere, but to feel rooted with the land where we live, building the soil beneath our collective footsteps–that’s special. It’s something I may have started taking for granted as our city grows and I step outside of my family’s beautiful, walkable bubble. I was so surprised last year to learn that so many people had no idea we had a community garden, and how big it is–and the good that we do for our community through it.

I took on leadership of the Golden Community Garden four years ago, pregnant with my second. It has been the hardest job I have ever done (pregnancy and labor do not count here) and I am a volunteer. In one of my first meetings as a garden lead, I was having a hard time speaking. I mumble a lot, I look at tips of noses, and I turn a terrible shade of turnip. A woman, older and wiser, who had no idea what I was saying, asked me if I was such a bad speaker, why did I take on this role?

Because I care.

I wanted this garden to solidify itself in the community, and I wanted to involve children in the garden as much as possible, because our children live here, too!

I convinced our local preschool to keep a community garden plot and to take field trips to the garden. I planted spinning gourds and mini pumpkins, zinnias of all colors, empress green beans and dill, tomatoes and peppers from seed so that they had something to come to, observe over time and eat.

Not only are kids happier than adults, they don’t complain about flea beetles or weeds and they see the magic in the garden. Children will watch a western tiger swallowtail prancing about on zinnias for minutes upon minutes. They will notice the salvia absolutely alive with pollinators, are excited for even one raspberry to pop in their mouth.

When my oldest started kindergarten last year, I reached out to see if I could help with their school garden club. The woman who ran the garden club had come to my plant sale at the community garden and was happy to have the help.

After helping with the school garden club for two semesters, the school garden suddenly fell into my hands over the summer of 2019. It was a mess.

The school garden is fenced in and on school property. It has ten raised beds, a butterfly area (thistle forest) and perennials around the inside perimeter, along with a shed, teepee, sitting area, worm home, outdoor potable (!!!) water and sink and three big troughs. and no one but myself to weed it all summer. The irrigation also did not (still) work, and with these dry, sunny Colorado summers, I had to go water the garden twice a day. My kids and I ate breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert there. We watched amazing sunsets and had water battles to keep cool. We kept plot journals and just sat or worked in silence, breathing it all in.

I spent weeks upon weeks weeding and planting and watering the school garden daily to get it to a point where I knew the kids would be thrilled to be in the garden.

I also completed a course through Denver Urban Gardens called the school garden cultivator program, which was awesome and made me realize how super ready I was to take on the elementary school garden! wait. I still run the community garden, too.

We’d love to hear more about your work.
Over ten years ago, my then-boss asked if I would be interested in making some herbal tea blends for the coffee shop I worked at, after the local account we had kept forgetting to drop off tisane. I said, sure!

At this point in my life, I had read every Rosemary Gladstar book, had mason jars of wildcrafted roots and herbs, and made tinctures and syrups for my friends.

I started my company, twig & leaf botanicals for the sole purpose of having a name to slap on the jar of tea.

I started selling herbs and herbal tea on Etsy in 2009, had cruelty free and vegan status and spent a few years doing that with intensity. It was a lot of learning and a lot of fun. When I had to start making lotion and things that weren’t my passion, I started pulling away. I missed herbs. I missed doing it all for the purpose of helping people be well. After years of my business, I rebranded after my daughter was born which revived things a bit for me, but I found I still just wanted to be with the plants.

After moving around with my partner and also solo quite a bit, we landed in Golden and started building our little family life, and I joined the community garden. Gardening is my jam. Everything about the dirt-caked lifelines, feeling the changes in seed, soil and seasons through simply bring present. Growing every type of parsnip imaginable. It’s all my jam.

Gardening is incredibly humbling. You cannot control mother nature, but you take care of your chunk of land, you notice sprouts. You notice insects. You notice when a tomato is missing. You notice how amazing those other tomatoes are and want to share them with the world and so you do.

Gardeners are some of the most generous, most resilient souls I have ever met.

In 2015, when my son was born, I started the Golden Seed Savers, a local seed saving group, as there were none. I host two seed swaps at our local library and an annual plant sale at the community garden in early summer. I grow hundreds of plants from seed, from my saved seeds and from those that I buy and am sent by other seed savers across the globe. All of the money raised goes to the community garden. My husband, every year, is annoyed at how I don’t keep any money for myself and that I still pay for my community garden plot.

In 2018, I started asking for a donation on my website (www.kellybeth.com) for any garden seeds requested through my website. This helps a lot as I go through over 1500 seed envelopes in a season and ship seeds for no charge all year.

In the summer of 2018, I was asked to help with a huge garden in Morrison, Colorado. I ended up providing all of the seeds, planted everything, showed up to help or problem-solve and teach the property owners and their friends how to plant a seed. How to plant many seeds. How to care, how to water, how to harvest, and after dedicating my entire summer to this, all of my seeds, all of my hard, hard work, they didn’t listen to a word I said about frost danger and I lost everything.

I also did this all for free and never saw a cent. My heart broke over how I was treated, over the loss of hundreds of beautiful seeds and vowed to not be treated like that again. It was a lesson in self-worth.

It worked. This summer I helped a woman on Lookout Mountain turn her struggling flower garden into a beautiful reality. I don’t know if I would say that I am a garden consultant. I envision it. I work the soil and I get to see what brings fire, warmth, and longing to the dreamer. It’s amazing. I feel this same lightness when I see the elementary school garden and how the kids interact with their space. It is their space, and I always tell them this.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I have moments.

• When I was told by parents of garden club gardeners that they have never seen their child eat salad or a bean or squash or basil and now they eat them as it’s any old thing, and request vegetables at home now!

• Organizing seeds to be sent to Puerto Rico after so much of their land, crops, seeds, homes and livelihood were lost.

• Realizing that I am worthy of respect and love and that my time is just as valuable as another’s.

Pricing:

Initial front range garden consultation, in-depth. $100
Hourly garden tending, planting, beautifying $50

Contact Info:

Website: www.kellybeth.com
Email: kelly.beth.with.love@gmail.com
Instagram: instagram.com/mamakellybeth

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