smith park GG

last night was fun.
i was exhausted and it was rainy all day, but the invites were already set out, so i was committed.

at 10pm my two lovely roommates (jenny and amanda) along with my friend chris (happy belated, bro!) went down to grand and rockwell right at smith park. the Chicago Tribune asked in advance to follow me on this dig to write a story-- so keep an eye out for the sunday special feature article in early august!

i had 35 flowers, two trowels, a small rake, a screwdriver and a pair of gardening gloves. ms. moriah showed up and it's a good thing she did because she is the fastest digger i've ever encountered. i think it's because she grew up on a farm.

anyway, the job was quick. we beautified the entrance to the park next to what looked like the restrooms, but apparently they are not restrooms. an old building of some sort. they had bushes, but no flowers and there is a park right by and a picnic table, so hopefully people will notice the difference.

a special thanks and shout out to my fabulous sister nicole who generously donated 20 dollars for the dig! she's in san francisco, so she can't help out in the sense of digging, but she wanted to help so she mailed me some funds. greatly appreciated

here are some pictures, though the after picture doesn't really do it justice:

viva chicago

well, it's been a little bit since the last dig.
here's the update:

I am over-ambitious and so when i originally said this would be a weekly effort, I got in over my head.
To remedy this, I knocked it down to a monthly event. much more affordable and attainable.

THAT said, I went on the June dig last night!
Josh, his totally awesome friend Keri and myself met up at the viva chicago mural (on Hubbard st at Carpenter) to plant some things. It was really hot out all day, but by 10 it had cooled off and was a beautiful night. With a generous donation of 10 dollars from my supervisor at Access Living I was able to buy some garden tools for this time around. It's a good thing, because this soil needed some tilling! it was hard and dry and lots of weeds.

We were also joined by a freelance journalist who is trying to publish a story on guerrilla gardening in the Chicago Reader. He was there asking questions the whole time, which made for interesting conversation (or really monologues..) but it was a good reminder to me of why i love this concept.

yes, it's fun. yes, flowers are pretty. but really guerrilla gardening to me is about a public service. i could garden all i want in my backyard (or tiny patio) but this is about spreading the love, getting together with a group of people and making a difference. it builds community with those I am gardening with and makes a statement to those that notice "hey, where did these flowers come from?" it raises community morale and it's so simple. every bit of land can be loved, even the forgotten plots, even the small plots. it all makes a difference!

anyway, below are the before and after pictures! check them out

Cafe Ballou

Well this week's guerrilla gardening took place outside of Cafe Ballou. It's right around the block from St. Helen's and they have these wooden flower boxes that were filled with weeds and not flowers. SO! Rachel and I took our saturday night and fixed them up.

It's finals week for me, so I was running a bit behind schedule. I got to Jewel Osco about 5 minutes before they closed to pick up some flowers. I was on my bike, so I had to put the flowers in my back pack and hope nothing spilled over in my bag! I got there, met up with Rachel and got to digging. Neither of us had tools (I was lacking in organization this week!!) so we just dug with our bare hands! it was sort of fun, though.

There's no action shots this week because there was only two of us and we were both digging. When we finished we asked a passerby to take our picture. It was a great way to spend a saturday night!

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.