Weeds
Initial Assessment of Rose Park Community Gardens
I spoke with Scott Steenblik again last night and I now have a much better picture of what’s going on. It’s not an ideal situation but I can work with it. Right now, the Rose Park Community Garden is managed by the Rose Park Community Council, but Scott, and Ralph, his father, feel that they have been neglectful, and from what I’ve seen—which, admittedly, isn’t much—I can already sympathize with them.
The council treasurer is the de facto treasurer for RPCG. Scott said this hasn’t been a problem, and I’m sure it hasn’t, but it leaves RPCG vulnerable. Scott is open to incorporating so I'm going to press for that if everything else goes well.
Scott and Ralph appear to run the garden themselves. Other than me, only one person showed up yesterday, and we were pretty much done for the evening by then. I'll be going again Saturday morning to see if there's a better turn out. Scott mentioned that they haven't done any community outreach so I'm not counting this as representative.
The garden’s water is supplied by a running well and a river share on Ralph’s property. I’m sure this mitigates costs tremendously but I don’t like the fuzziness of the arrangement. Nonetheless, it would be an extremely difficult problem to overcome right away so I can be content for now.
The garden plot itself is in okay shape, except for the fact that they’ve been working on the water pump so the plot is a bit thirsty at the moment. It’s the condition of the adjacent plot that is worrisome. It’s completely unkempt. It has one large dirt pile at the north end, apparently some industrious kids made it for a little bike fun. Just behind the garden to the west is a large pile of leaves. And the rest of the lot looks completely uninviting, especially the large patches of stinging nettle. It’s a great area, though, right by the river. It’s got the river walkway that continues throughout Rose Park. And it’s a nice quiet little neighborhood. If the parcel were properly managed, it would be a great place to hold events.
Overall, the place isn’t very inviting. When they put up a fence, they put up a standard chain-link yard fence. Replacing it would help a lot, but it cost $2,000 and was installed just four years ago, so I’m not going to push for that just yet. Scott mentioned that he wants to put up a sign and a bulletin board. I’m sure that will be a part of the budget that will arise from the $10,000 grant arriving in July. I’d like to make this count for as much as we can manage. If we can get a sign and bulletin board designed to fit in an overall redesign of the entire site, including a new fence and a landscaped adjacent plot, I’d be happy. Of course the entire redesign would wait, but at least when we get a chance at it, we won’t need to think about the sign and the bulletin board. Now I just need to get some donated landscape architecture work and convince the city to either landscape the vacant lot or let us manage it.
That’s more long term, though. For now, I’ve got to formulate my outreach plan. I already have a facebook page up, but that’s not going to be my primary focus. It’s going to be more a matter of going door to door. I have some invitation copy but I want to work on it some more. And I’m going to need to get it translated into Spanish. And then I’m going to need to get it printed. Then there’s the Rose Park Community Festival at the end of the month. Scott has a lot of seed cans to sell to raise money, which is great, but I’m trying to think of what else we can do. Unfortunately, I’ve only got about a week to come up with something and put it together. And I'm broke.
Hopefully, I’ll have a few ideas and maybe even some pictures for the next post.