Ocotillo Blooms 2020!

Each spring, the desert comes alive as the wildflowers bloom and transform the Yuha Desert into a colorful canvas, and the best place to celebrate this is at the Imperial Valley Desert Museum!

On Sunday, February 23, the IVDM hosted its 2^nd Annual Ocotillo Blooms! – a community based event designed for families and children to come out to the Museum and celebrate wildflowers blooming in our desert and learn the many values of native plants.

This year we had 170 attendees, many of them being families with young children. The event included food,music, vendors, painting, a water color activity, scavenger hunt, desert biome lecture, and butterfly release. We were able to release 100 painted butterflies into our desert!

Our vendors included, Vince & Victor Zazueta, who were set up with a compost station, and natural products for sampling and purchasing. Some of the items available were loofahs, seeds, and fresh homemade lemonade! Imperial County Behavioral Health Services Positive Engagement Team (P.E.T.) provided a booth with their therapy dog, Bo, who made many friends including our resident tortoise Speedy! Loko Bean Cafe's coffee cart had many refreshing drinks to offer like Italian soda, iced coffee, and chamangos, as well as cotton candy.

It was a beautiful day in the desert to celebrate the yearly phenomenon known as the desert bloom. A desert bloom occurs when enough rainfall penetrates dormant seeds and causes them to grow quickly before desert conditions cause them to dry out again. We received a small wave of rainfall two weeks prior to the event, which caused the brittlebush, Ocotillo, and creosote to thrive surrounding the museum. We look forward to what it's in store for us next year!

Thank you to our sponsors El Centro Costco, the Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment, participants, vendors, staff, and volunteers for making this event possible!

Meet and Greet! IVDM visits the San Diego County Archive

~ Kristin O'Lear, Curatorial Research Fellow

The staff here at IVDM has been on the go-go-go! This past week I was fortunate enough to be invited to a behind-the-scenes tour of the new San Diego County Archives before they open to public on Monday February 3, 2020.


Here at IVDM we understand just how important a facility designed for preservation is! About to undergo our own renovation of collection spaces here at the Museum, the sneak-peek of the new archives facility was an opportunity for me to meet and network with other institutions in the greater San Diego area. This allowed for me as acting curator to learn about collection management policies utilized at other institutions and steps they have taken to ensure the preservation of their collections for future research and use. 
 

From a collections perspective, the building is a Curator's dream! The space dedicated to archival material is roughly 5000 square feet and built with the intention to grow as San Diego County (SDC) grows, setting aside space for approximately 50 years of SDC records in addition to the archival collection that is currently being housed off-site!  The building also provides a spacious reading room that allows multiple researchers to utilize the space at one time.








Although IVDM is a smaller institution and our collection needs differ than those of SDC, the preview of the new archives facility reinforces our commitment to the highest standard of care for our collections. As a curator, it makes me more conscious of IVDM's needs as a smaller museum to make sure we take the best possible care to preserve our history!

Stay tuned for future posts as we begin our renovation project in March! We can't wait to show you what we have in store(age)!