08/14/2026
🌻 What a night in the Garden! 🌻
Last night’s Harvest Party was such a beautiful way to celebrate another season together. Our gardeners received their awards, we ate pizza and cake, blew bubbles, met a stick bug and some ladybugs, and even had a visit from a tortoise! 🐞🍕🎂🫧🐢
We were so happy to welcome community tables from Single MOMM, the Grand Traverse County Health Department, and Child and Family Services of Northwestern Michigan, and we had some truly incredible friends help make the evening special.
A HUGE thank you to Skegemog Raptor Center for generously DONATING their time, They are available for your event as well!
Thanks to Standout Stilting for being absolutely whimsically amazing!
A very special thank you to ReVo Lawn , our 2026 season sponsor, for supporting the Garden and helping make this year’s programming possible. We are incredibly grateful to have you growing alongside us! 🌱💚
Huge giant shout out and thank you to The Filling Station Microbrewery for generously donating every single slice of pizza and some salad! We are at a loss for the right words, we couldn't ask for better neighbors. Their Pizza is top notch. Please visit them sometime soon and thank them for being amazing community members.
We were sad that Mulberry Family Farm couldn’t join us this year, they expressed sincere apologies to you all, but we already look forward to seeing them next year. ❤️
We also need to give a very special (and slightly overdue!) thank-you to the G.T. Butterfly House & Bug Zoo . We realized afterward that we failed to properly recognize them last night, and they absolutely deserve it. They have supported the Children’s Garden for years and have become one of our most treasured community partners. They brought Speedy the tortoise to the party AND arranged our butterfly release, which made the evening even more magical. 🐢🦋 We are incredibly grateful for everything they continue to do for our kids and our garden. They are still open for the season, it's a wonderful place for the whole family! Go see them!
And then came a surprise NONE of us were expecting! 🇺🇸🚁
The U.S Coast Guard flew right past the Garden, and suddenly everyone was looking up, waving hello! Living in a Coast Guard city means these incredible men and women are part of the fabric of our community, but seeing them overhead while our whole garden was gathered together was pretty darn special. Thank you to our Coast Guard members, families and gardeners for everything you do for our community and for the unforgettable surprise fly-by! Wow! Thank you Lydia and family!
We also want to thank our Board of Directors...the people working behind the scenes throughout the year to keep this little garden growing, evolving and welcoming our community. And thank you to Michele Pfaff Howard , Director of the Traverse Area District Library, for her kind words last night and for continuing a partnership that goes all the way back to the Garden’s beginning.
For 27 years, the library has been our closest and oldest partner, and after all that time, one thing remains pretty obvious: libraries and gardens just belong together. 📚🌱 Both are places where curiosity is encouraged, where children can explore at their own pace, where knowledge is shared freely and where an entire community is welcome. One grows ideas and the other grows living things and around here, we’re pretty fond of growing both. We are incredibly fortunate to have spent nearly three decades doing that alongside the Library.
Most of all, thank you to the many, many helping hands that went into preparing, setting up, cleaning up, organizing, decorating and making the night wonderful. We loved seeing familiar faces AND meeting some fantastic new volunteers. This garden truly grows because people show up. 🌱💚
📸 Thank you Susie Afton for sharing photos with us. Were you there? Please post your Harvest Party pictures in the comments! We would LOVE to see the evening through your eyes.
And if last night made you think, “Hey, I want to be part of this,” we would love to hear from you! Email us at [email protected] to get involved.
And while the Harvest Party traditionally marks the end of our summer programming… we might not be quite finished yet. 🍂 We’re tossing around some ideas for a fall pop-up event or two in the Garden, because there’s an awful lot of fun (and learning) that happens when the leaves start changing. Stay tuned!
Thank you for another beautiful season of growing kids, community, curiosity and a whole lot of memories. 🐝
