First, the good news.  We received word on Monday November 3rd that we CAN use the Harlem site for the new community garden.  This has taken much longer than any of us imagined, although I’m not sure why I would imagine anything dealing with the State of Illinois would take less than like a million years!

The bad news is that the site is basically a big ole pile of rubble.  (As a side-note, I think the word “rubble” is seriously under-used and under-appreciated and I personally plan to use it every chance I get for a while.)  As Jessica described in her post about taking the soil test samples, there is only about 4 inches of dirt, then she hit rubble in every spot she sampled.  I know it’d be much easier if this site was pure rice dirt just waiting to be planted, but that’s usually not the reality of community gardens.  The idea is usually to take a spot that nobody wants and turn it into something beautiful for the community to enjoy and to create a place where folks who might not have the space to garden can grow their own food.  This is just that sort of space.  We’ll just use raised beds (which many people prefer, anyway) and plant right on top of the rubble.

Bonus good news: Jessica also finally received the results of the soil test and the lead levels were fine for planting.

So, moving forward, our new best friends are the folks over at the Park District of Forest Park.  They currently maintain the property and are very excited to work with us to make the Forest Park Community Garden a success.

The Brown Cow Ice Cream Parlor is the best place to be in Forest Park, hands down. They make a lot of the ice cream themselves and every flavor I’ve tried is spectacular.  The ice cream parlor has only been in business a few years but it is so popular (lines out the door in the winter time etc…) that they’ve already moved to a larger space. 

So, what better place to hold an event that you want to lure people to so that you can ask them to help with your community garden? That’s right! We are having the first community garden event at the Brown Cow. 

When I told my neighbors where the meeting was, they practically started booing me. Not booing me as in “bad place for a meeting” but booing as in “you low down dirty scoundrel you know that nobody will say no to a meeting at the Brown Cow!” What can I say, we are smart girls!

So, here’s the deal. Be at the Brown Cow Ice Cream Parlor on June 25th at 7:00 or you are not cool like us.

Tonight was the recreation board meeting.  We found tons of great information about how to start a community garden on the American Community Garden Association website that we used for the presentation.

The recreation board is made up of volunteers from the community who maintain all the “pocket parks” in the area.  Each person is assigned a park and if something breaks at your park or your park is looking particularly crappy, you are responsible for reporting the problem and making sure that it gets fixed. I love that!

Our presentation went well.  Everyone was extremely supportive and it turns out that there used to be a community garden in this area back in the 70’s.  That was great news to hear because it means that this community has proven that it will support a community garden.  When the old garden was closed, it had over 260 plots which was over 100 plots more than when it first started.

After we discussed the idea and potential locations for the garden, we were asked to find more helpers and come back to the next meeting on the first Tuesday in July.

Thank you recreation board! We will be back!

This week I sort of feel like that crazy scientist from Back to the Future.

I can’t believe I just made the first contact yesterday and we are already headed to a board meeting. It just so happens that they meet the first Tuesday of every month and that would be tomorrow.

Not knowing how to go about contacting our local community government to discuss the community garden idea, I started by taking a look around their website.  I contacted our Commissioner of Public Property who invited us to the Recreation Board Meeting to present our community garden idea. 

So we’ve got 24 hours to prepare a presentation.  This should be interesting.