A unified community through gardening

As you drive down South Main Street in Brooksville, you may notice a tiny green house with huge plate glass windows. This is Greenhouse on Main, which opened in January of this year. You may think nothing of it until you venture inside.

On stepping through the front door you’ll be greeted by the owner, Sarah Vaughn, with her warm smile and energetic personality. As you walk further into the store, you may think you know it’s just a vintage marketplace with oh so many treasures you may want to take home, but the store is much more than a place selling items from times gone by. Sarah runs her shop to support herself, but even more, it’s about making the world a healthier place for people to live, one organic plant at a time.

It’s also a place to come learn. Sarah hosts a monthly Saturday morning meeting for the Greenhouse Garden Club featuring local garden guru Rita Grant. A recent meeting was all about growing ginger in your yard, and each person that attended went home with a potted ginger rhizome. There is a different topic each month such as foraging, which may involve a field trip to the local park. Sarah also offers a kids gardening club, called In the Garden with Lil Bees, to correspond with the adult garden club meeting.

The big draw is the Co-Unity Garden, a small community garden that Sarah started right outside her store. For now, it’s comprised of four planter boxes, which the Koontz Smith Initiative out of Orange City, Florida, made from reclaimed window shipping crates. Volunteers will join Sarah in planting and maintaining the seedlings, which come from Organic Harvest Farmstead in Brooksville. Sarah is looking to start with sweet potatoes, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and loofahs. Kids like to watch loofahs grow and families appreciate that these gourds are a great natural alternative to a washcloth. As the garden becomes more popular, it will grow and become bigger in the same way that plants grow and become bigger. Produce grown in the garden will be available to purchase in Sarah’s store.

One of Sarah’s first projects was setting up a large black compost bin for the whole community to use. You can stop by and drop kitchen scraps (plant only) into the bin anytime, day or night. Sarah is also enlisting the help of local restaurants to accept compost from anyone, and then they will drop it off in the bin. So far, Mountaineer Coffee and The Bistro, both only blocks from the store, are offering this service.

Greenhouse on Main is not just about gardening, Sarah also offers book clubs for adults and children, as well as workshops ranging from painting to health and wellness. She has a dream to one day off er cooking classes, as clean eating is a big part of who she has become. Sarah is all about living a clean life through food and the products we use on our bodies and about repurposing things instead of buying new.

• Keep up to date on all the good things happening at Greenhouse on Main by joining their public Facebook group. For more information on anything mentioned here and more, you can call Sarah at 727-858-9044.

Greenhouse on Main
500 South Main Street
Brooksville, Florida