PPG Community Gardeners Meeting
So yesterday the PPG had it’s monthly community garden meeting and it went pretty good. I arrived about 15 minutes late so by that time the participants had already broken into two groups. I joined a group and met Lisa and Cheryl who both work in the nursing industry. Lisa is a billing specialist and Cheryl is an infant care nurse. Both of them have little to no experience gardening but were really wanting to join the effort in starting something here in the valley by volunteering their time. So the three of us sat down and brain stormed a few ideas. Not that any of these ideas can happen now, but we thought it would be good to still put them out there and add to the idea bucket.
- Check with mulching services at dump. Sometimes city dumps set aside organic materials like yard clipings and tree leaves.
- See if any municipal leaders can help. Two names came up Maria Baier and Phil Gordan.
- Look into the New York City, Washingon DC area community gardens and see what they did to get up and running. Maybe contact them?
- Locate and start tracking potential plots of land. Then find out things like who owns them, water source on plot, places to compost, what residents live in the area who would be interested, and so on…
- Can community gardens be had at the Phoenix parks?
- What more is needed to get schools involved?
- Get schools to start growing their own food for kids’ lunches.
- Opening schools up in the evenings for things like community pot lucks, free urgent care facilities.
- Getting schools, especially middle and elementary, to teach more culinary classes and agriculture classes.
- Contact churches to see if they would be interested in starting compost piles or even community gardens.
Phew. Yeah we had fun thinking of a lot of things. Again, this is based on a bunch of assumptions. We have no clue what is involved to get a lot of this done, but decided it was still important to think about. It’s energizing meeting people who have this authentic desire to help. Makes me want to leap tall buildings in a single bound. LOL!. Anyway, met some cool people and hope to keep this up. Now for the hard part, which is trying to get some of the stuff on this list done.
My Hole in the Ground
After a few days I’ve managed to remove about 90% of the dirt in a plot from my backyard, as the photo below shows.
The size is roughly 4ft wide by 37ft long by 2ft deep. I broke a few PVC pipes which was frustrating but I think I should be able to fix them tomorrow. I talked with Jen and we should be setting a site analysis for my home in the next couple of weeks or so. I know what you’re thinking, “But Ron, shouldn’t youhave done the site analysis before you decided to dig a grand canyon in your backyard?” To which I can only reply that you are correct. Oh well. In any case should be a good chance to get some PPG Design Course students out here to see what they think and to provide some advice. In the meantime I need to work on fixing the PVC, getting woodchips, getting a little more compost, getting some coffee grounds, and a few cardboard boxes. Then I can begin filling the hole and start planting. The good news is I a close friend named Debbi who is interested in starting her own garden as well. So the digging doesn’t stop here.
Software Development
So after the decision to stick with Ning for a while, I decide to turn my attention to a few other things:
- Installing a wiki
- Looking into making some widgets for the site.
One of the things that came out of the AZHS’s class at Partners in Participation, was that we agreed to install a wiki or some kind of software to document stuff. This way member have a resource they can use to help them with gardening that is specific to our region. As with most software there is sooooo many to choose from. So I’m still looking.
In the mean time I’ve also been toying with some widget stuff. Check it out here:
So nothing to impressive, but it is a start. From there I hope to do some more stuff. I’m using a widget/user interface library I came across called ExtJS. It uses javascript and was orginally made for the Yahoo widget library. The best part is that ExtJS is open source and very mature.
Now some people wonder why I’m a huge advocate of free open source software. One of the biggest reasons is freedom. You are not tied down to the decicions and policies of the developer, as I found out in this Ning Developer post about widget laboratory. Essentially the story goes that due to issues Ning was having with a 3rd party over repeated violations of user information, Ning had to let the developer go. Some people were a bit angry as the decision was made without their concent. This was a set back for some as they had invested a lot of time and money in both Ning and the third party Widget Laboratory. In the end Ning recovered and now offers a bunch of cool little apps and a development platform through the OpenSocial API. However, I hope my point is clear that sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes opensource can give you that freedome to branch off and move on if the developer does something you don’t agree with.
Anyway, we’ll see how ExtJS holds up.
That’s all for today. Time for bed.