Apr 17 2012

Our Garden Space

Posted at 4:14 pm under Argus

Miss Christen from Sharp community garden comes for a visit!

Yesterday, we were visited by a friend from Sharp Community Garden, Miss Christen. Miss Christen talked to us about how her organization set up a community garden to support families that didn’t have fresh fruits and vegetables. We learned that the garden is right over by Butler University (across from St. Thomas) and anyone can volunteer time to work and eat from the garden. We had a long list of questions for Miss Christen about how to go about starting a garden. How much should we water? How long will ours take to grow? Does her garden have bees and worms? Should we plant everyday? What should we do about weeds? Miss Christen was even kind enough to invite us to see her garden and help with planting in a few weeks. She offered to come assist us with ours as well. (We are currently waiting to hear back from our Butler friends in the leadership class about funding for some garden boxes and garden equipment- very exciting!)

One of our questions for Miss Christen was where to put our garden. She suggested somewhere where there is lots of sun (at least six hours), good soil, and water can get to it easily. After her suggestions, we decided to take a walk outside our building into the “yard” area on the north side of the building and look for space. After exploring for quite a bit, we found a space we felt comfortable with! Ruth commented there were hardly any weeds in that relative area. David said that there was plenty of light and it would get lots of rain. For the rest of our time, we decided to play and explore our new found garden space more. As this was happening, some very interesting things happened. First, friends started collecting weeds to protect our new garden space. Children started running at full speed down a sloped space and grabbing weeds as they ran. Ruth explained, “Its a game- I call it Weed Runner! Try to not stop while you grab them!” More and more friends joined in on the fun.

Friends enjoy getting to know our garden space on a beautiful day.

Monica collects weeds from Ruth’s Weed Runner game.
Hutton pulls weeds to improve our garden space. He likes Weed Runner!

 Friends also began placing their handfuls of weeds in a rectangular shape around our proposed garden sight to mark its location. This led to a class discussion on shapes today and what shapes our garden boxes could be in. We went back outside again today and showed one another shapes that our garden could be in.

A heart shaped garden box.

What about doing a triangle for our garden box?
Should we do a rectangle for our garden box?
Cameron shows us what a crescent shape is.

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