The Big News

I won the lottery! No, ok, I didn't.... which was particularly sad b/c I was really feeling it this time.... I just knew were were going to win $43 million on Tuesday night. I was already planning to call in sick to work on Wednesday. When Nick called in from the other room to tell me that we hadn't gotten a single number right I felt a bit more defeated than usual. So, no, that's not my news.

Now its time to finally tell you about something very exciting I've been up to lately. My new friend, neighbor, fellow gardener, and former Tennessee resident Gina and I have cooked up a scheme to start a community garden in our neighborhood. Gina and I, who met through blogging, have been talking about this idea for a couple months now. This officially became more than just an idea last month when Gina and I met with the Recreations Board in our Village to discuss our idea and potential locations for the garden. The Board had a very positive response to our idea, and they suggested four potential locations for the garden. However, we knew that this idea wouldn't go anywhere if we didn't have community support and other residents who wanted to participate. In what I think has at this point proven to be our tendency to set almost unreasonable goals for ourselves that lead to stress and ideas of jumping ship, we decided that we needed to get the word out about our idea and hold a meeting where interested individuals can learn more / tell us what they think. We hung flyers and posted on the web forum for our neighborhood and somehow managed to get 20 complete strangers to show up in one room last Wednesday all because they saw our flyer to discuss the garden. The group's enthusiasm was overflowing. People began to volunteer to help plan the garden and fundraise the funds we'll need to get the garden going. We also created a website and designed an online survey where people could tell us what they thought of our idea and what their vision of a community garden is. Yesterday, Gina and I, along with some of our new community garden supporting friends, visited the Recreations Board again to tell them about our progress. We told them about the wonderful meeting we had and showed them the website we've created. We told them that we had 15 people take our survey and express their support. We showed them initial site analysis we had performed for the three potential garden locations that had been discussed at the last Recreations Board meeting (the fourth location was judged to be too small). The Board was VERY impressed with all that we had accomplished over the last month. They gave us some ideas for our next courses of action: We plan to distribute a petition this Friday at our Village's 4th of July fireworks. We'll present the petition to the Village Board at the next meeting on July 14th. We're also going to get a soil test to look for possible toxicity at the preferred garden location to make sure that there's not a prohibitive amount of toxins in the soil. Lead contamination, we've been told, is a legitimate concern when it comes to urban soils, especially for land that's near high traffic area (the potential garden location is actually adjacent to the freeway). We also hope to organize a planning and a fundraising meeting sometime in July so that we, and our growing supply of community garden troops, can make more specific site / operational plans for the garden and start to solicit funds and donations. Our goal is to have the garden ready to plant by March of next year.

I just found out today that the local newspaper will be interviewing me about the community garden for their upcoming issue. This is great since it will be yet another way for us to get the word out about this idea. I'll post a link to the story once its up.

So that's what's going on... the big "news".... when I'm not working on this I'm usually working in my own garden (or shopping for purple dresses hahha!) so life is busy these days... but good.. very good. :) (a note to the universe: although, dont' get me wrong, winning the lottery would still be great too).

Thanks for reading.