St. Helen's Gardening

Last week I was riding my bike trying to find a place to garden next.  There's really no shortage of places to garden, but I think this is still an important part of the process.  I also wanted to have it near some friend's apartments so that I would guarantee the extra help since this is still so new. 

I found this elementary school (I swear I will garden at other places besides elementary schools- it's just that there are so many and they always need flowers and I love the idea of children and teachers benefiting from this) called St. Helen's.   They had all these planter urns with nothing but weeds and leaves in them.  

There's a before and after shot of one of the urns.

There were five total. At around 10:15pm, my two core gardeners came out with me (Josh and Pam) with the soil, plants and gardening tools. Shortly after our arrival my dear friends Moriah, Rachel and Nick came out and got cracking. Between the five of us, it took about 10 minutes to revamp all five planter urns. We were all sort of amazed at how fast it was, and were unsure if we missed something big. When we realized we didn't, we posed for this shot, taken by Nick:


The best part- about 10 minutes after I got back home that night it started to rain! So I know those flowers got the watering they needed to last longer. I rode by the other day and checked on them and they're bright and visible.

Introduction

As an attempt to get the word out about this guerrilla gardening project, and to hopefully get some momentum and community involvement, I am going to post weekly updates on the sites. This way no one has to go on facebook to look at before and after pictures of the gardening events!

Rewind to two Thursdays ago: April 16th, 2009

My very good friend Josh told me he knew the perfect place for gardening. It was in the playground of this elementary school around the block from him. They have these empty plant box benches that never have flowers in them for some reason. As you can see, they're really cool, but could use some love and color.



That's where guerrilla gardening comes in. I snapped some before shots, gathered a small crew- myself, Josh, my friend pam and my friend and classmate Andy. I bought some plants and some soil, Pam brought the gardening tools and we gardened hard for about 10 whole minutes before we transformed the benches into this!

Hopefully the kids and teachers appreciate it!  If not, I had a lot of fun and I'm pretty sure everyone else did, too.