Neighborhood Garden

I’ve recently purchased a lot in my neighborhood that measures around 25’x150’. Its located on a corner and gets full sun throughout the day - I would love for this piece of land to become a botanical oasis in our formerly manifucturing district neighborhood. With this garden, I would like to provide the community a sustainable and healthy gathering place welcome to anyone who cares to participate. I would like this garden to serve as a place of learning and exploring, with opportunities for any botanical interest. I want to both generate fresh, interesting and delicious food and give back to the environment with a healthy planting of native polinator plants. Lastly, I want this to be a space that people want to spend time at.

In order to meet all of these interests, there needs to be a lot of thought put into the design of the lot. Not only because there are so many things that need to fit, but also because not all space is created equal when it comes to gardening. This lesson is especially important to consider when planting perennials that will take many years to start to produce, such as trees, bushes or canes that will serve as monuments to poor planning if placed in the wrong spot.

This project is going to take many years, dollars and contributors, but in the end, these are some of the things I want to have in place:

• A safe garden area that is publicly accessible
• A sustainable way of managing this space that allows for growth and change in the garden and community
• Multiple contributors of ideas, labor, finances and responsibility
• Irrigation solutions to make management easier
• Garden plots managed by many different people
• Fruit trees, bushes, canes and other long-lived perennials
• Native pollinator patches
• A food waste prevention system - Allowing people to offer up excess produce and share abundance with their community
• Community plots that anyone is welcome to harvest or plant in
• A place to sit and enjoy the space

I don’t anaticipate any of the above to be easily achieved goals, but thankfully I have a long time to chip away at this problem. I’m hoping to track my progress, thoughts and lessons learned on this blog throughout the process. Heres to a greener future :)