These plants in my house grow, and I'm thrilled by them.

Who would have thought that, when I saw the first bits of green creeping up from the soil, I would have been so excited that I yelped, all alone in my house?

Tomorrow, we'll take those amazing, growing shoots, and plant them in the actual garden.

KC will be excited, I know...

Steph

Finally, after much patience and nurturing, my plants are starting to show some progress! :0)

These are MORNING GLORY and they grow super fast even in really crappy soil. Too bad they're not perennials...These are waiting to take over the pool fences!

My FOXGLOVEs are growing as well. Their seeds were so tiny I had such a hard time planting them one by one.

CLEOMEs are a little larger than foxgloves. They look more stronger steadier.

I am starting to question whether these plants will be enough for our gardens, since we have so many to take care of...
The thought of these projects continuing after the semester, whether it be by future Calvin students or embraced by the neighborhood, is a comforting thought.

May our labor not be in vain.

Jane

the van was packed
we stopped in east hills to see the neighborhood center gardens

heather and jane gave a short talk about their site
stephanie was at the festival of faith and writing

- Splinters

Thursday was a great day. We planted some of our seeds and went to our garden site to start working in the actual garden. We really do have a lot of work to do. There are some 11 or 12 gardens. Yes, there are names for all of them and there will be a map listing the all but it is still in the works. Hopefully it will be completed within the week. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention! I have tomatos, basil, and orageno sprouting! It was like over night, they were there. It's very exciting!

We have some other good news. On thursday we had our first conversation with a community member. He is a highschool student at Gateway, a school in the area. He helped us out for a bit while he was on break from school and was telling us the best way to get weeds out. Seriously, this kid walks up asks us what we were doing and then just starts pulling out these huge weeds that we were really struggling to get out. The trick it to twist them! We told him to come around again the same time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Hopefully we'll see him again.

Tomorrow we'll be back at the gardens. We have so many plans it will be hard to get them all in before the end of the semester. By the way, the opening of the park is coming up and we hope to have the gardens in good shape for that event. It includes food and beverages, and a good time to meet the community. Stay tuned for the date.
Heather

So much progress has been made since the begining of this project!
I don't think any of us has expected it to be so exciting and refreshing. Esp for a college student like me who's normally stuck with on-campus lecture classes.

April 10th, Tues: Went to Meijer, bought seeeeds!

Then....We planted them in small containers to start the process of germination.

According to Steph's friend who is an expert on gardening, we shouldn't transplant them into the garden until Mother's day. I am not sure if we can wait till then... since we do want to see some progress on our actual garden before the end of this semester.

This is a really quick map I made. The proportions are all off. The green areas are our gardens. We named each one of them but I didn't memorize them. Heather will make an accurate map with glitters on it! Please look forward to that one...

My wish is to make a small asian fish pond in one of the gardens...
We'll see how that goes!

Jane

It all started with coffee, of course.

I had gone for a run around my neighborhood, the small square of Grand Rapids called East Hills, and I was discouraged. The neighborhood is mostly residential, and any areas that would work for gardens were fenced off and locked. Where could we put our garden?

We met at my place on Cherry Street this morning to figure it out. We had good coffee and apple pie, and we talked about our options. We decided to get in touch with the core of the neighborhood.

We went to the East Hills Council of Neighbors

And we talked to KC (just the initials)

She said we could use whatever space we wanted, as well as the water and tool supplies. She said we could basically start out own gardens, with our own concepts. She said we could take over.

We went outside to talk about it

and decided that this was the project we wanted to take on.

Then we had a groundbreaking ceremony.

We decided that we want to make a difference in the neighborhood, and we're excited to get going on it...

steph (and jane and heather)