I saw this on Render’s blog, and considering our work towards an artist-led community garden, I had to repost it. Not much to look at lightly dusted in snow, but the idea is incredibly great.
Running from April 2009 to the following winter, GROUNDWORK will function as a community garden and creative research site. The project will take place on the grounds of Rare, a 913-acre nature preservation and agriculture education site located on the Grand River between Galt and Blair. GROUNDWORK will bring together a core creative group of a dozen youth from the Gaweni:io School (Six Nations) and Waterloo Collegiate Institute’s Collision group to develop and cultivate a community garden/site of creative research and knowledge-sharing.
The community-outreach on this project is considerable, and it’s projects like these that involve such deep integration and collaboration with different parts of a community (and it seems Render is taking on more and more of them) that really interests me as an artist and parallels some of the bigger things I think we’d like to do in BCL.
I’m pretty darn sure that Al Penner was talking to me about this last night. He was saying his brother Andrew (Sunparlour Players) knows the woman running this ( a genius horticulturalist), and how it’s going to be amazing.
If it’s the same place, Al said he helped her BUILD a greenhouse recently on that site, and that it was because the land is full of clay…meaning…they are employing urban-gardening measures on certain spots of that land. How cool is that?
I think this project has huge potential, awesome that they’re employing a number of strategies for planting on that land, which is fitting as a research site / community garden … funny you mention a greenhouse, I know Josh has mentioned the idea of moving towards getting a greenhouse going on vacant properties, eventually (that’d be a really big project).
From a meeting we had a couple weeks ago now, it sounded entirely possible that a community garden on city-land in the downtown area is within the realm of possibility. Any places you think might be particularly suitable in the downtown?