The 37th annual Garden Tour in Los Osos and Morro Bay is set to kick off soon and is hosted by the American Association of University Women (AAUW).
“It started in 1881 to encourage and support girls and women to go on to higher education,” said Mary Jefferson, AAUW Morro Bay branch president
The garden tour saw 500 people last year and raised $7,000. All 100% of the proceeds go directly to local girls’ education.
“We sent six girls to Tech Trek, and we had four girls from Morro Bay High who got scholarships to start their first year in college,” Jefferson said.
“Tech Trek is a really cool science camp where all the 7th grade girls go to during the summer and learn about science, engineering, and math,” said Madeline Pearce, Los Osos Middle School eighth grader.
Pearce says she enjoyed the robotics portion of the camp.
“We got to make a little LED lights light up while using a lot of coding and making this machine spin around. We were in there for three hours, which was really fun,” Pearce said.
Heyley Salgado was also among the girls from Los Osos Middle School who went to the Tech Trek camp at UC Santa Cruz last summer.
"I really enjoyed being in engineering. We got to build a bunch of robots and test them out and have like a competition,” the now-eighth grader explained.
She says the camp inspired her.
“Every night, we would have a night meeting which would talk about stuff that was happening around our planet and what we would want to see change, and that really inspired me to take care of our planet,” Salgado said.
There are two gardens in Morro Bay and two in Los Osos that you can explore at your own pace.
“They’ll be able to see different gardens and how people’s personalities are represented in their gardens, and the variety that grows in this area is amazing,” Jefferson said.
The Garden Tour will be held on Sunday, April 27, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. For more information on how to get tickets, click here.
