Free Sept. 10 campus event features tips on sustainable lawn and garden care, live music, food trucks and prizes

A free event called Great Yards Get-Together, featuring information on how to maintain healthy lawns and gardens using environmentally-friendly practices, will be held on Saturday, Sept. 10 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Heritage Park, next to Capitol Lake, in Olympia.

Free native plants will be given to the first 50 people who visit the Great Yards Get-Together welcome booth.

Landscape experts will be on hand to discuss natural lawn care techniques and answer questions.

Brent Chapman, Enterprise Services’ horticulturist, will lead two tours of the west Capitol Campus grounds – at 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. – to showcase sustainable landscape management practices used there.

The campus landscape tours will look at the use of bioswales to control and treat stormwater runoff, an ecolawn trial area where grass is grown using no irrigation, fertilizers or pesticides, organic weed control methods and more. These practices can be recreated on any scale – from a large yard to a small townhouse garden.

To go on the campus landscape tour, meet at the intersection of Water Street SW and Legion Way SW at 10:45 a.m. and ride the free Dash shuttle from Heritage Park to the west campus, or meet at the flag circle area just north of the Capitol Building.

The Great Yards Get-Together event is being hosted by the cities of Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater, Thurston County and the Department of Enterprise Services.

Enterprise Services is the state agency responsible for maintaining the buildings and grounds of the 486-acre Capitol Campus, which includes Heritage, Sylvester, Marathon and Centennial parks.

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