May 27, 2014. Rebekka poses with part of our first Green Acres “Uncanny” Project harvest. YES!
Written by Rebekka, with input from Rebecca, Georgia, and Ann.
On Thursday (May 22), Tuesday (May 27) and Wednesday (May 28) four of the Green Acres Neighborhood women piloted the first efforts toward the UnCanny Village Project. On Thursday, Rebecca and Rebekka went door to door along Hillsdale, Overview and 5th Street to inform neighbors of the project and to ask them for their cans to be picked up the following Tuesday. Unfortunately, most people weren’t home that evening. The women spoke to 5 neighbors, who were all interested and willing to donate their cans.
Meanwhile, Georgia had done the same thing on Hillsdale between 3rd and 5th, and 4th street, and nine neighbors were willing to participate.
The following Tuesday, Ann and Rebekka drove around the block to pick up two bags of cans. (Did the others forget?)
Also, on May 22, Georgia went around the block of 4th Street, Hillsdale and 3rd Street. Of the nine neighbors, only one remembered? On Wednesday morning, before the recycling trucks arrived, Georgia did pick up one box of cans.
Since we don’t have many cans yet, we’re going to hold them until we get enough to make a trip down to the Salvage and Recycling Center, where they will be weighed and exchanged for money — currently 53 cents per pound (34 cans = one pound). Profits will go toward programs for GANA (this neighborhood association) GANG (our first neighborhood garden) and GANE (our forming ecovillage).
In conclusion, while our first efforts led only to small outcomes, we realize that every big project has to begin somewhere. All participating women are motivated and encouraged to try again next recycling week. Next time, we will bring paper handouts including the three websites for further information. If you’re interested in helping out to spread the word about GANA, GANG, and GANE, plus raise money for our beautiful neighborhood, look out for the next email stating the place and time for our next meeting regarding the UnCanny Project.
Saturday, May 18, was the occasion for our annual plant swap, an event that usually draws the same dedicated characters — plus a few new neighbors. This time was no exception. Six neighbors showed up between 10 am and 2 pm, most of them, Rebecca tells me, early on, which is good, because then everybody could choose plants they wanted to take home.
This time the surprise was in the variety of plants people brought to share. They included iris, marigolds, lilly of the valley, columbine, wood poppy, assorted veggie starts, black berry and raspberry starts, and asters. Plus, an even bigger surprise, none of the usual staples: hostas and daylilies!
Kathy suggested that we plant the extra plants during one of our planned guerilla gardening adventures, in a public area, probably around midnight . . . I’m checking to see if the city mows the area around the new underpass. And even if it does, perhaps we could put up a sign saying “please don’t mow these plants down.” That would be an interesting experiment, eh?
Unfortunately, since I wasn’t here, no pics of the Plant Swap event itself. But it sounds like a good one, and that afternoon Rebecca tells me four people showed up to work in the GANG garden. YES!
Plus, two days ago, I was out walking with puppy Shadow when I came across the adult son of a neighbor on the corner of 7th and Hillsdale who was mowing an enormous lawn and collecting the clippings. He agreed to give them to the GANG garden, and actually dropped them off, later. YES!
This morning I added a layer of grass mulch to some of Rebecca’s newly planted beds.
But the best I saved for last.
Last night, in the middle of the night, Rebecca woke up and remembered that she had decided to go get the probably 40 pieces of perfectly good long pieces of wood that were stacked by a dumpster on 7th Street, near the Fire Station. So, at 2 am, she roused herself out of bed, started the truck, and went to pick it up. The the best part for her? A fireman came out and asked if she wanted help. Unfortunately, she was already done. This wood will go a long way towards any building projects.
Hey neighbors, come check it out! Plant seedlings with us. And/or purchase your own seedlings from us, cheap, to help support the GANG garden. Get Rebecca’s expert advice on gardening, should you need it! Do join us as we continue to build community and food production in our Green Acres Neighborhood. Here are some photos from the above post. Many more, and text too, when you click on the link.
On Sunday night last, April 27th, ten neighbors met in the Green Acres Neighborhood Garden (GANG) for our regular monthly potluck and update as to our plans and projects. Unfortunately, I forgot to either assign secretarial responsibility or to take notes myself, so hopefully I can convey what we talked about.
Georgia had quite a long list, including the Small and Simple Grant she has applied for, which would pay for printing and postage for a planned quarterly newsletter sent to all 440 homeowners in the Green Acres Neighborhood. We’ve decided to publish this newsletter to help those who own Green Acres rental home recognize the sustainability goals of the Green Acres Neighborhood, as per our vision statement, as filed with the City of Bloomington:
“Green Acres aims to become a sustainable neighborhood that embraces neighborliness and forges partnerships within and beyond its borders.”
Georgia gave an example of “partnerships beyond its borders” concept in her effort to get Green Acres neighbors to go with her to help one of the local churches, just across 3rd Street from our neighborhood, with the redesign of its wonderful, but neglected in the past year or so, labyrinth. Four of us met there, on Saturday morning, to help that effort. Here are Georgia and neighbor Devon, walking the new design (notice the flags with red paint; the actual paths will be mowed rather than lined with rocks, as before).
Another very interesting initiative that Georgia brought to the table was the idea of collecting all the beer cans that flow forth from student rentals during weekend parties. Rather than putting them in the recycle bins, how about collecting them for the neighborhood, and getting money for them to put back into neighborhood projects? (We can get 50 cents a pound for them.) The students and other young people present at our meeting really jumped at this idea. One of them, Rebekka, decided to take it on. I suggested that she give the initiative a name. Later that evening she sent an email to the GANA email list:
Here’s the Uncanny Village Project (name not set in stone) outline:
-Now would be a great time to collect cans due to the semester drawing to an end and student partying.
-The recycling weeks in May are the week of the 12th and that of the 26th, so getting people’s cans before then would be best.
-On an evening very close to the Wednesday recycling day we will go around to houses (preferably those with partying individuals) to ask if people would be willing to donate their cans to our fundraising project. For example, I can go on an early evening while walking Haskell and knock on some houses down 7th, Clark, and 5th Street.
-While going from “door to door”, we will tell them about the overall GANA plan and goals, and offer to add them to the email list if they’re interested.
-If they’re willing to give us their cans, we will tell them to put out their cans the evening before normal pickup (either Sunday evening or Tuesday evening – I don’t totally understand how the schedules are split up) so we can gather them up in time before some set time, like 8pm.
-The more closely we can emulate a system that resembles what they’d do anyway, the more likely we will get them to give us their cans.
What do you think?
I emailed her back saying that I didn’t really understand the name. Duh! “UnCANny” . . . Okay, now I get it. In any case, it’s a go! Thanks, Rebekka! I love this idea of repurposing beer cans, since so many of them are generated in this neighborhood with so many students.
Contact Rebekka (rebekka.dohme@gmail.com) for more information on this initiative.
The other Rebecca at the meeting, an organic gardener with 40 years experience who is heading up the GANG garden this year, spoke about putting up regular hours for working in the garden. She will do this on the Green Acres Neighborhood Garden facebook page, as soon as her work schedule elsewhere is finalized. Meanwhile, she (we) have lots of vegetable starts for sale, cheaper than at the Saturday market, if you’re interested. Come over to 2601 E. DeKist, or email her: jacobswife53@gmail.com, or call her: 812-822-2053.
Oh yes, and look for an email to the list about the upcoming annual Plant Share, to be held probably on May 17th, at a new location this year, the GANG garden, 2601 E. DeKist.
I spoke about my own initiative, or rather, Grand Plan! that might take decades to fulfill — most likely beyond my time on this planet — but which begins with David Orr’s suggestion, when he spoke here a month or so ago about his work with The Oberlin Project, a town/gown sustainability initiative in Oberlin, Ohio — and that is, to learn to have lunch with lots of different kinds of people. Last week I began, by lunching with the Assistant to the Sustainability Director of IU; at 4 p.m. this afternoon I will have coffee with the Sustainability Director of the city of Bloomington. Not sure who’s next. The aim of these conversations is to start a new kind of discussion in town, one in which the Green Acres Neighborhood might serve as a pilot project. More on this later.
BTW: the meal was great, lots of salads, very much in keeping with the spring urge for fresh food! Hey, check out this morel! A seasoned morel-spotter found it this morning, and five others, so far, in my still mostly dormant backyard.
Hard to see, eh? Clue: it’s in the center of the photo; looks like a brain.
We happened to schedule April’s GANA potluck in the GANG garden for the evening before it started raining, luckily, and it’s just now let up, after two days and nights of off-and-on again thunderstorms.
This month we didn’t attract the young ones in the neighborhood. We wonder if the coming midterms had something to do with that. At any rate, the eight of us present at the meeting got right down to work over a very fine meal (lasagna, lots of salads, and three cakes!). We went over our agenda itemsitems quickly, thoroughly, and with lots of spirited dialogue, and then established three committees to move them forward.
• Annual Spring Plant Share: This will be held on the second weekend in May at 2601 DeKist St, with Rebecca as host.
• Nearby Volunteer Opportunities
In keeping with our Vision Statement in the plan we developed for the city of Bloomington —
Green Acres aims to become a sustainable neighborhood that embraces neighborliness and forges partnerships within and beyond its borders
— we decided that for this year we will forge partnerships with one of the near-by churches, First United, on 3rd Street. To this end, we are asking that any Green Acres neighbors who feel moved to do so, volunteer to help with their April workday, the Creative Aging Festival to be held there in May, and with the Winter Shelter, 2014-2015. More on each of these later.
• Help Plant Trees along path between Roosevelt and Bryan: City tree guy Lee Huss will be planting these (sometime this spring?), and could use some neighbors’ help. We’ll let you know when that will happen.
• Green Speakers: We are thinking about asking local people who can share some aspect of what sustainability involves to speak to us at our meetings, perhaps twice a year. (At one point in the past, we had speakers at every one of our monthly meetings. Which year? Can’t remember.)
• Clean-Up for Neighborhood? We’ve done this in the past, one Saturday morning, about two hours, neighbors walk around designated streets with bags the city provides, and clean up the place. Especially good right after all the parties are over at the end of the semester. . . The more of us do it, the faster, and the more ground we cover. We’ll decide on this at next monthly potluck.
• Newsletter to Home-Owners in Neighborhood: This is a brand-new idea, one instigated by Vickie Provine at HAND. Two other neighborhoods are already doing it. This is to get a list of all the home owners in the neighborhood, and send them via snail mail twice-yearly newsletters, to let them know what is going on in the neighborhood and, hopefully, eliciting their partnership and cooperation. We have the list, but there are holes in it that need to be filled. We established a committee to sit down and complete this list: Ann, Georgia and Richard. Hopefully, printing and postage will be provided through a Small and Simple Grant from the city. Georgia will write the grant.
• Include Current Listing of Homes for Sale in Green Acres on websites, both GANA (Green Acres Neighborhood Association) and GANE (Green Acres Neighborhood Ecovillage) with the intention of attracting more people to the neighborhood who choose to live in the homes they purchase: especially young families! While this, and other core neighborhoods in this university town, will always be a place where there are lots of IU students, we would like to see Green Acres stabilize itself enough so that we can not be subject to, but welcome student energies. Neighbor Jane Spearman used to do this for us. Now Richard Evans, a new GANA member, has agreed to take up the task.
• Heal the Edges Project: The other half of our meeting was taken up by what I’m calling the Heal the Edges project, needed as a result of trees being taken down both on the east side (the Bypass project) and the north side (Duke’s new “alley”). We realize that, at least in part, these so far destructive (to the neighborhood) projects could present opportunities to further manifest elements of our Green Acres Neighborhood Plan as filed with the city. (see: https://bloomington.in.gov/media/media/application/pdf/52.pdf). There we visioned paths along all sides of our neighborhood. We are surprised to recognize that this has been accomplished (including the new sidewalk from Overhill to Sahara Mart on 3rd), without our lifting a finger! Now we need to figure out how to make these newly opened areas work for us rather than against us. The people along the north side (about six homes, I think) feel less safe, and are also bothered by the lights at IU’s new tech building, as well as the noise of the bypass. The people along the bypass (six homes directly affect on the part of Eastgate that parallels the bypass) and the six or seven homes near the new underpass at the end of 7th street) are all directly affected by bypass noise. We have lots of ideas about how to work with these areas to help neighbors along the edges be less affected by the changes, and will be working with both the city and with Dave Rollo, one of our two city council reps, to get these areas well served.
We established two committees to work with the edges:
Along north side: Rebecca, Jelene, and Rowan
Along east side: Richard, Georgia, Al and Kathy
All three of our committes agreed to meet at least once prior to our next rotating potluck meeting, which will be held on Sunday, April 13th, at 2601 DeKist.
I met with Dave Rollo on the day after our meeting and reported on the ideas we have for the Edge Project. He’s going to look into some of the issues that might come up with the city, INDOT and Duke and get back to me in about a week. He wants to walk the north and edges together with us sometime soon.
We welcome your input, and especially your participation in our potlucks, events, and committees!
P.S. If anyone wants to know details about our ideas, so far, about the Heal the Edges project, please contact me and I will fill you in. We have a lot of ideas some of them more plausible and practical than others. Basically, we want to create new barriers along north side and Eastgate parallel to bypass. And we want to create a park-like inviting atmosphere at the Underpass, including benches, a neighborhood sign, plantings, a mural project underneath the underpass, and so on.
I also asked Dave if it would be at all possible to change the speed limit on the bypass between 3rd and 10th to 35 from 45, since that decrease would reduce the noise considerably and he will look into that. He’s not sure whether it falls under Bloomington’s “home rule” or not.
