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.

Now that we made the local Forest Park newspaper, does this mean we’re famous? 

The Forest Park Review published an article in today’s paper about our efforts to garner support for the community garden.  I think Jessica and I both agree that we hate the picture.  The photographer that took it was really nice.  We asked him what we should do as far as posing and he informed us that we should just act like he’s not there.  We were like “dude, we would totally NOT be here if you hadn’t asked us to come!” Now that the article has hit the newspaper, we’re really hoping people will visit the website, take the survey and maybe even sign up to help with the garden. 

The Forest Park Review is a community newspaper published every Wednesday.  I love it because they only publish local interest articles.  I have no idea how many Forest Park residents read the newspaper, but I read it, and I don’t even read newspapers.  

Our next step is to set up another meeting to begin to develop strategies for planning and fundraising. 

We’re still looking for ways to get the word out and recruit new volunteers to help plan and fund-raise for the community garden so leave us a comment if you’ve got any good ideas.