Fresh picks freshen up the lunch hour!

Sitting downtown at work, dreading your lame peanut butter and jelly, or Wendy's cheeseburger lunch? Stop over to the garden on your lunch break and pick some fresh greens. Couple some fresh arugula with vine ripened tomatoes for a healthy, filling salad to replace that boring lunch of yours! Fresh is the best, and the garden needs picked so it can keep replenishing itself. Come on down!

Film Screening Saturday

Please check this website for rain cancellation if the weather is questionable.

katy's garden journal #1

This morning, the delightful Ryan Agnew joined me in the garden! We went over early this morning to water: it's been very hot and dry here, and every day the soil is bone dry. I worried about the new seeds that were just planted, but there are little sprouts of corn coming up now. There are plenty of fresh veggies that are ready to be cut and eaten, so I'm hoping that people will take some when they come out tomorrow morning for Bring a Plant, Adopt a Plant.

We also painted the garden seats yellow (tree trunk logs: courtesy of Danny! thanks), and they turned out great....Ryan was especially excited because yellow happens to be his favorite color.
We decided that the plot needed some sort of welcoming sign right up front, that invited people to come into the garden, look around, and participate. It took us awhile to decide on the perfect thing to write on it, but with the blessing of one of the neighbors, we decided on: "Welcome. Open Garden". I hope it will bring people on to the plot that would normally just walk by.

We didn't work too hard though: we made time in between watering, weeding, and painting, to squirt ourselves off with the hose and to try our hand at the horseshoes (we had both never tried before.......we sucked. Horseshoes is hard. really hard!)

It was a really wonderful morning: thanks Ryan!

Bring a Plant, Adopt a Plant

Join us this Saturday, July 19, from 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. for a neighborly
plant exchange! Bring a plant that you'd like to see in our garden, and
take one that you'd like in yours! Come learn more about the project, offer
ideas, help work in the garden, play a round of horseshoes, or just hang
out.

Click here for details: www.bureauforopenculture.org

film screening tonight CANCELLED

Summer movie night is CANCELLED :(
Rain: bad for movie night, but great for the garden!
Check back for more events...

seed bombs continued

To elaborate on a previous post....here's a good video explaining seedbombing courtesy of Hassan S. Ali and Dorothee Royal-Hedinger of Fresh Cut.com's DIY series:

Middleman, Shmiddleman

More and more people are turning to local food that they grow themselves. Our own garden is a small scale version of cutting out the middleman and growing and eating local on your own terms. For a much larger scale version of this, The New York Times discusses cutting out the middleman on a farm sized scale by a sort of communal sharecropping 2.0 Read more here.

Signage

We finally have a sign on the plot with a brief description of the project. Ideas circulated about what kind of signage. By chance, we happend to have a discarded tree stump on the site that we then decided to appropriate as signage. This project has truly been blessed by the many generosities of the community. Many thanks to Cliff, an alumni of CCAD, who generously provided time and assistance with the signage printing.

Plant File

BASIL: (Ocimum basilicum) Height: 30" Planting: grown from seeds or cutting, plant in full sun with well drained soil. Very easy to grow.

Uses: cultivated for culinary use, this herb is popular in Thai, Vietnamese, Italian cuisines among many others. Other uses include aromatic and fragrant oil.

Its medicinal properties has been recommended for alleviating digestion ailments.

For home use, grow a pot of basil near the windowsill or kitchen to ward off pesky flies.