GREEN BAY — The Green Bay Botanical Garden will open up its space for all to enjoy for free this Saturday, Sept. 28, for its annual Fall Family Festival — an event aimed at celebrating the community which supports the Garden.

“Fall Family Festival is our annual free festival for the community,” said Linda Gustke, director of education and guest experience at the Garden. “We do it every fall as a thank you to the community for enabling us to be here and for supporting us. As a 100% community-supported nonprofit, we’re only here if people are becoming members and bringing their friends and coming to our events. So we like to have a free day in the fall to just give back and say thank you and invite people out for a fun fall day at the Garden.”

In addition to the community at large, Fall Family Festival also celebrates the Garden’s ties to the Oneida Nation with special programming to highlight the partnership.

“This will be our third year where we are focusing on celebrating our connections with the Oneida Nation,” Gustke said. “The land that the Garden is on is technically part of the reservation and we have a lot of similar ways that we operate and care for the environment and things like that, so we’re excited to be able to showcase Oneida in our community.”

This year, attendees of Fall Family Festival will be able to take in performances by the Oneida Pow Wow Dancers and Oneida Adult Smoke Dancers, demonstrations by Oneida Artists Eliza Skenandore, Jennifer Jordan and Scott Hill and learn more about the Garden’s Purple Loosestrife Biocontrol

Partnership Project.
“The purple loosestrife control partnership project is a project that we participate in with the Oneida Nation,” Gustke said. “Purple loosestrife is a major invasive plant that is in our area and rather than using harsh chemicals to control it like we have to do with many invasives, there’s actually a beetle that specifically eats purple loosestrife. So we raise the beetle on purple loosestrife in a contained area by our horticulture team… And then the Oneida contacts and people in the project actually take the beetles that we raise and release them in various spots onto the purple loosestrife to help control it.”

Other activities around the Garden this weekend will include face painting, balloon artists and an opportunity to harvest native seeds with the Brown County Seed Library — a partnership between the Brown County Library, the Garden and other community organizations to provide seeds free of charge to anyone interested in planting vegetables, fruits and pollinator-friendly plants.

“In the Central Library in downtown Green Bay and on the second floor there’s a card catalog with seeds in it that the community can just come in and grab and plant in their yards,” she said. “There’s fruits and vegetables, but then there’s also native plants because we know that in order to have the fruit, we need pollinators that are able to pollinate the flowers and then make the fruit. Planting those native wildflowers helps to bring the bees, the butterflies and the other pollinators that then will pollinate fruit and vegetable plants. With the Brown County Seed Library, part of the initiative has been to teach the community how to be able to harvest those native seeds themselves, so the Seed Library will be out that day and they’ll invite the community out to our Grand Garden where wi have a wide variety of native plants to help collect some seeds and then those seeds will be packaged up eventually and placed back into the Seed Library for new community members to grab when they’re ready to plant some natives. Actually, the fall time is not only a great time to collect those seeds, it’s also a great time to plant… If you plant in the fall, then they get started a little bit sooner in the springtime when it starts to warm back up.”

The blend of educational components with the other activities of the Fall Family Festival, Gustke said, is in keeping with the overall goals of the Garden.
“Part of our mission at the Garden is to connect people with plants,” she said. “Especially with this event, we are inviting families out and the community out, so we want to have that ‘edutainment’ — education and entertainment together — because a lot of our entertainment and our education go hand-in-hand. They’re fun and they help connect people with our mission.”

In addition to the education and entertainment that will be available at Saturday’s event, Gustke said attendees should also make note of the natural beauty all around the Garden as fall settles in.

“Our roses are just beautiful right now — roses grow into October in Wisconsin, which is amazing,” she said. “Our native plants are really showing off… In our Partnership Garden we display All-American Selection winning fruits and vegetables, so you’re going to get to see a lot of those foods still out there and see them growing on their actual plants, which is really exciting. Our Cottage Garden, I would say that it shines in the fall with some really tall, big, draping plants.”

Admission will be free for all during the Fall Family Festival from 9 a.m.-6:30 p.m. with special programming taking place between 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

Learn more about Fall Family Festival and find a complete programming schedule at gbbg.org/fall-family-festival.