Sarah took the plunge and joined in on a community garden plot. Or rather, 4 plots, I believe, as part of a team of five people. Here she is planting some onions.
It’s great — the Willy Streeter Community Garden, a former pig-farm (apparently) a little more than a half mile from our house, very convenient, right near the Y and a playground. Should be a good spring-summer family activity. For various reasons the home garden thing hadn’t been working as well as we hoped for vegetables, there were some light/shade issues. But now that we’ve started, it seems to make so much sense to do it more communally. Everything’s nicely set up at the community space, with the land tilled, manure available, and a hose right there. Our friend Leah is an artist whose work involves plants, gardens and seeds — I’ve seen her described as an enviro-sculptor — and one perk of having her part of the group is that she has a big backlog of nice organic seeds. When I was there helping out a bit on Sunday, we were planting onions and leeks and parsley.
A decade ago we lived in Hyde Park, Chicago for two years and we have friends who’ve been heavily involved in the community garden there. We enjoyed a lot of pesto from basil planted in that garden — Anthony and Kirsten used to bring home big laundry baskets of it and have basil-making parties. Unfortunately, the garden is being razed by U. Chicago — a sad story [this is the Chicago Reader article about it].
Ivan Kreilkamp 