We were getting overwhelmed by the amount of children coming in and making seedballs. I’m just glad I’m not the only one who likes to play in dirts. Kids are cool. They were all so good at listening and really focused. We even had one girl who appeared who stayed for a few rounds of making seeds. Parents seemed to get a kick out of it to and enjoyed watching their children making a mess for a good cause. I’m surprised that some of them didn’t initially get that the balls are supposed to sprout life. Some would ask if a plant would grow or if you told them that “Hey, you may see a little plant in a few weeks…”, their eyes would light up with excitement and anticipation. It really seemed like they wanted to see this work. One little girl even thought that the bigger she made her ball the bigger the plant would be. Not quite the way it works but Jen said she could try it and see what would happen. Great stuff. This was the first public PPG event I’ve been to that was geared specifically towards children and I loved it. We need to do more like them.

Wow an amazing meeting.

This is a wrap up of what is going on in North Phoenix and of the notes from our meeting.

• Looking for ways to get the neighbors more involved and doing things that allow us to get to know them.
• Nick is working to get a school garden started at North High School next year. He also has his eye on an empty plot of land by his home.
• Nick is working to get a school garden started at North High School next year. He also has his eye on an empty plot of land by his home.
• Proposed meeting once a month for the group. Possibly the second week of every month?
• Creating a community resource Database/Spreadsheet
  • List any materials or equipment people have to loan.
  • Might contain people and locations in the area that are composting for the community.
  • Adding a resource of stores or restaurants that give away organic material and coffee grounds.
  • Listing people who are storing seeds and what they are saving.
  • Anything else that might help people in the area.
• The Horses Help Facility want to work towards opening up their facility to sustainability programs and events
  • Horses Help facility is looking to become a major Hub Solution for the North Phoenix area.
  • Their presentaion room is open for teaching classes and hosting movie nights.
  • Looking to work with AZHS sustainability and gardening experts to help create garden beds and composting bins in the empty and unused areas of the Horses Help facility.
  • They want to hold Green events and tents to allow the public to come in and learn about sustainable living.
  • Creating and herb and sensory garden for autistic children and people will disabilities.
  • Inviting local chefs to harvest the food and to host classes on how to cook with the food.
  • Drawing in local schools to come see the horses and visit the future gardens.
  • Use the facility and things we offer as a way to generate income for both AZHS and Horses Help. For example charging for classes, events, and possibly charging for a few products we might be able to produce. There are a lot of opportunities to try and genereate a little money for both organizations.
  • We need to work on a economic model for sustainability. How are all these programs and projects going to be paid for and how are they going to economically sustain themselves.
  • Horses Help has a pool of over 250 volunteers who can help us setup what we will need for the site.
  • Eagle Scouts are an excellent resource for volunteers. They are usually limited to what they can participate in, however planting and gardening may be something that they can help with.
  • Several troubled teen or people help services can come to the facility to help us garden and maintain the site.
  • This seems like an optimal opportunity for Permaculture Design students to really come in and work their magic on this site. Gregg has practically given us free regin and is very excited to see what comes out of this.
  • Try to set up this North Phoenix facility as a model for many of the other Horses Help locations around the country.
  • Working with local busniess. One of the Horses Help members is Cathy Phifer, who’s husband is a regional director for Home Depot, so we may be able to ask them for help in the future. This may include things like creating a small list of needed items and seeing if business like Home Depot can give us a hand in getting those items.
  • Ken Singh has offered to give Greg and special one on one host and instruction on how to do composting on a massive scale. If we can establish Horses Help as another composting resource this should help aleviate the demand on Ken a bit.
  • Look at providing making this a place where youth from all over the valley at various schools or organizations can come to and learn.
  • Is it possible for Horses Help to have a green store on their location?
• Updates on Mountain View Facility
  • Currently working with Walter Knox who is the coordinators at the Mountain View facility to see what possibilities exists for a community garden to be put in at that parks and recreation center.
  • Talked with Ken Vonderscher Deputy Director of the Central Phoenix parks and recreation areas and he is interested in working with AZHS. Several other groups garden at some of the parks but they mostly do roses and flowers.
  • Ken also gave some advice on things the Parks and Services will be more receptive to:
    • AZHS might be able to give them advice on how to revamp the city’s adopt a park program.
    • Arranging for volunteers to help with graffiti painting, garbage collecting, light prunning, and some general park maintenance. Perhaps that can be part of the agreement of renting a plot?
    • The details of having a community garden at a park still need to be worked out but we do have to people from the city who we’ve started a dialog with.

Here are some of the pictures from the facility. Just a lot of areas where gardens could go in. Again we need to get some Permaculture Design students up here. They will go wild.

So a very relaxed meeting where we just got to know each other and began brainstorming ideas back and forth. This list is here as a reference so hopefully we can start creating a few goals and tasks to move ahead. There are good people in this group and we can make some magic happen.

1. Check with mulching services at dump. Sometimes city dumps set aside organic materials like yard clipings and tree leaves.
2. See if any municipal leaders can help. Two names came up Maria Baier and Phil Gordan.
3. Look into the New York City, Washingon DC area community gardens and see what they did to get up and running. Maybe contact them?
4. 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…
5. Can community gardens be had at the Phoenix parks?
6. What more is needed to get schools involved?
7. Get schools to start growing their own food for kids’ lunches.
8. Opening schools up in the evenings for things like community pot lucks, free urgent care facilities.
9. Getting schools, especially middle and elementary, to teach more culinary classes and agriculture classes.
10. 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.

My Backyard Photo

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:

1. Installing a wiki
2. 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:

My test widget!

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.