About a year ago I met with Katie and Sylvia to discuss the possibility of starting this community garden. I had gotten the idea when I was taking my Permaculture Design Certification course and we visited the Chicago Honey Co-op. In addition to a vast apiary, there was an extensive garden growing on top of the concrete! This garden became my inspiration, if we could harvest sweet potatoes out of a heap of compost the size of a canoe on concrete it could be done anywhere.
So there were a lot of logistics that we needed to work out. Sylvia helped bring my lofty ideas down to reality. From there we all started to put together a proposal, again Sylvia and Katie were vital to this process. I believe that I just put my thoughts into writing and they are the reason why we are about to begin sheet-mulching soon.
After our initial meeting (I don’t know the sequence of events exact but this is a general synopsis), we contacted the alderman and found out that we should attend their monthly open community meetings. All wards have them; just call the alderman’s office. I also found out that the alderman requested that we apply for the NeighborSpace garden.
Katie and I completed this application over a couple months; we had realized that we were planning for this year so we were in no rush. I had gone to one aldermanic meeting and received tentative approval to move forward. It took some prodding (I tried to make it as easy as possible; I emailed a draft of the letter in a Word document to them which allowed them to just make the modification they needed.) but we got the approval from the alderman and they sent their letter directly to NeighborSpace. We haven’t heard back anything from NeighborSpace just yet but we are still moving forward. The main thing we need help with is to get access to use the fire hydrant across the street.
After we got our approval, we got some compost delivered to get the process started. We leveled it out to about 2’ deep. Katie planted some bulbs and brought some straw over to the property. I’ll let Katie write her experiences in her blog: Chicago Style Garden. Then we let winter come…and it has snowed like never before! In retrospect, I think we should have done some earthworking to collect all that snow water…but please excuse me permaculturists. I’m learning as I go and this is a lesson I have learned.
The challenges as I am currently designing the space are that the property is completely flat, its lead levels are a little too high, and there is no water on site. I’m going to have separate entries for the sheet mulching plan/research and another for the design.
