Green Acres: Report from this evening’s second monthly rotating potluck

Our First Annual Bloomington Neighborhoods Celebration and WOW!

The newly resurrected CONA (Council of Neighborhood Associations) decided to hold a Neighborhood Celebration. Created a poster. A big poster. Here’s the top part of it.

Sent it out to all the neighborhood associations to send to their email lists.

How did the evening go? Well, we were plenty worried. We had rented the ballroom downtown, and who knows, maybe 30 or 40 people would show up, huddled in that giant space on such a cold cold night (Monday night, projected to go to -7° F) . . .

Well, guess what! Something’s going on with the Bloomington grassroots, something wild and strange and rising. Who knows, our next meeting of CONA (Council of Neighorhood Associations) may have to be held in an auditorium! And the best part about it? Everybody lives in a neighborhood of some kind. I mean everybody. No one is excluded.

Here we are, in full force.

We spent our evening eating, drinking, and getting to know each other, trading stories about what works and doesn’t work building community in our various hoods. A great time.

Even Mayor Mark Kruzan was excited and surprised —

 — and told a story about being coached in a course called “Macromathematics”s  IU when he was a freshman by one Jon Lawrence, our new CONA president! Bloomington truly is a small town, where lots of folks have known and loved and agreed and disagreed with each other for, literally, decades.

CONA has been around for a long, long time. 20 years? For a few years lately, it had gone dormant. Well, no longer! After a few monthly meetings, the new CONA group decided to hold a celebration, and this was the result.

Just remembered that I got an email with a bit of the history of CONA after inviting our Green Acres email list, from one of my neighbors, Al Ruesink, who shared what he knows in lieu of being too infected with a cold to attend. Here’s from what he said there:

One of my reasons for attending would be to share a bit of the origins of what I believe to be the first CONA in Bloomington.  As I recall, Tom Goby (deceased), Sherwin Mizell (gone from Bloomington), and I were key players in getting it going and my first meeting notes are dated November, 1971.  Though I don’t think he was involved in the first meetings, by the time I went on sabbatical in 1974 it was being led by Jerry Marshishky, who is still in town.  Since that time it has had a series of dissipations and restarts, but I have always considered it a good idea.  It gives a more regular representation from the grass roots than City Council does and it provides a good way to share ideas for making neighborhoods really neighborly.  Sorry I cannot make it tonight.

Wow! 1971. That’s 42 years!

May CONA live on, and may our neighborhoods continue to strengthen internally and with each other. My own vision sees Bloomington as a networked mycellium of villages, each village node intergenerational, and with its own history and character. Hopefully, within ten years, many of us can be living and working in place, helping each other, sharing skills and tools and meals and conversation, secure in the knowledge that we are here for each other, rooted in place, caring and connected to both the vast flow of human creativity as well as to this good, solid, nourishing mother, Earth.

Green Acres Neighborhood 2013 Harvest Party: (The usual question: “Will anybody come?”) Read on.

Re-posted from exopermaculture.com.

Saturday afternoon

October 26, 2013, 1-4 p.m.

Harvest Celebration

Green Acres Neighborhood.

Georgia and I were clear, focused, and determined; this party would happen! No matter what! To that end, Georgia bundled up 250 bags with all sorts of info about GANA (Green Acres Neighborhood Association), and she and I managed to distribute them to the doors of  maybe 200 of the 440 homes around here. We were hoping that they would catch the attention of newcomers especially, which means, mostly, in this core neighborhood near Indiana University, students, in their ever-changing, newly-occupied student rentals.

The idea for the party cooked up over the summer, when Forest Gras, of the Forest Gras Band, moved across the street from Georgia and kept telling her that we should have an event. Well, of course, that’s always a good idea, and GANA has held many events over the years, but we hadn’t held one over in her neck of the neighborhood for at least four years. Since 2009, we’ve held events in the Green Acres Neighborhood Garden next door to me, including Harvest events; so I was happy to see this 2013 event move two blocks away, to Georgia’s side yard. I’d help with publicity.

To that end I also sent an invite and reminders to our GANA list-serve three times.

But who knows? Will anybody come?

That’s always the question in a university neighborhood such as ours that has so much student “flow” through it, and where even core people (those who live here for years, hopefully) move out of the neighborhood or out of town, or get too busy with other things to join us in our continuing, stalwart intention to unify and vivify our neighborhood, transforming it eventually, into the Green Acres Neighborhood Ecovillage (GANE).

How many times have I slipped into depression when one of our favorite active neighbors flew our little community coop? How many times have I had to talk myself out of depression, to see flow from a larger perspective?

“Flow” is also a permaculture term, and usually refers to flows of air and water and soil and seeds and animals, not people! But looking at our neighborhood in permacultural terms, yes, young vital students are perhaps our most crucial, and vital, flow.

Okay. After our flurry of publicity (which also included a sign in Georgia’s yard for the final three days, facing the street), Saturday rolled around.

Refrain: Will anybody come?

Most of the week had been rainy off and on, then turning unseasonably cold. Saturday morning dawned overcast, though not quite so cold. But geez! Will anybody come? (At one point that morning, losing faith, I thought about calling Georgia to ask if we should call it off.)

Okay, 1 p.m. Time to head over there.

Walking those two blocks, hauling chips and salsa, I commanded the sun to shine in ten minutes. And you know what? Ten minutes after I arrived, the sun peeked out, and then remained for the duration, closing behind clouds just after 4 p.m. as the party ended. Hmmmm.

When I got there the place was sort of forlorn. Sweet tables and chairs set up, the four-person band bravely fiddling with sound gear and wires under the stand-up tent, a table with tablecloth and goodies already on it.

Where was Georgia? Where was anybody else? Oops!

Aha. There’s Jen. Think I’ll go with her down the street to investigate her wonderful front yard garden, and chicken coop in the back.

Here’s her front garden. Sweet gate!

Here’s her partly finished stand-up greenhouse/cold frame. Yes! Her husband, who works full time, is going to get a friend to help him finish it next weekend. This weekend, he took the kids (two and four) to his parents’ corn and soybean farm.

On the extreme left of the photo, inside the greenhouse, do you see a bunch of dead-looking vines? They cover sweet potatoes, which she’s about to harvest.

Here’s Jen with her little family’s backyard coop. Nice. I will come back for a closer look when we put chickens in back of my house next year. I’ll also ask my son Sean, in Massachusetts, for the plans he used to build their coop. And check out a few more local ones. And maybe even repurpose the existing shed?

Wow, her chickens have a big back yard! Probably twice the size of my son’s back yard, which may be why, unlike his, they haven’t ruined this one with their scratching and pecking.

Jen is demonstrating self-sufficiency with her garden and chickens. Other neighbors on their block are thinking about doing the same. We’re demonstrating neighborhood cooperation with the Green Acres Neighborhood Garden (GANG). Both are necessary in times to come.

[That’s right: We feature GANA, GANG, and GANE . . .]

Okay, back to the party. The band has started to rev up, and geez, they’re good!

My body wants to dance. (But will anybody come?) Where’s Georgia? Aaah, there she is, dancing towards Jen and me and Jen’s sweet dog.

Well, it took about an hour. One full hour for people to start sauntering over,

despite that they could hear the band from several blocks away. . . . Luckily, we had gotten permission from the city for this three-hour afternoon event! At one point I walked back to my house, to get my dog, and ran into a neighbor with her dogs, and invited her to join us. She look at me with a pinched face, said “no thank you.” And then asked if we could turn the volume down, because “It’s not the kind of music I like to hear.” I told her I’d see what I could do. But of course the band didn’t turn it down.

Always, in any neighborhood, there are those who have trouble getting into the (temporary) swing of things . . .

When I got back, the sauntering in was well on its way,

including at least four or five undergraduate student neighbors! One of them even played and sang during the band’s intermission. Yay! That’s what we were hoping for! Plus, they all signed our email list, and several of them want to work in the GANG garden. YES!

Just as exciting to me, two youngish men, Malcolm and Rowan, came to the party, men who have recently moved into the neighborhood and want to get more involved. Two youngish men, joined by a third newcomer, Forest of the Forest Gras Band! Yay! Plus there were a number of people I’ve never seen before, including one shy, older man on his bicycle who, when I introduced myself, said he was sorry my dog died (my little white dog Emma, who died two years ago); that when he read my blog posts about her death (I’ve referenced the first one, all five are found on the page The Grieving Time), he cried. I almost cried to hear him say that. Not because of Emma, but because of his sweet, vulnerable reference to his feelings, and because it made me realize, once again, how you never know how your one wild and precious life may be interacting with others’.

Here’s one final shot, showing the crowd that, like me, couldn’t actually stand to be all that close to the loud band, even though we loved the music and the camaraderie.

All in all, a wonderful day. Thanks everybody, for sauntering over! Thanks, Georgia! And thank you, The Forest Gras Band! Check them out!

cdbaby.com/Artist/Forestgras

forestgras.com

Green Acres Neighborhood Garden revs up for 2013! JOIN US!

Here’s what went on yesterday.

Photo Essay: GANG Garden work day, April 21, 2012. Thanks, everyone!

Neighbors Jen Naylor and family have transformed their entire yard into a tiny urban farm!

The garden in June — garlic, broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, peas and peppers.

April 27, 2013

by Jennifer Naylor

A few months ago, the lovely Georgia Schaich asked me to write a blog post for GANA.  Today, as I was digging away in our front garden and perennial beds, and my hens were clucking around the backyard, I decided I better get to it! For those of you I have not met, my name is Jen Naylor and I live on E. 4th Street with my husband Shawn, our two sons, two dogs and a flock of backyard chickens.

Two of our Barred Plymouth Rocks and a Buff Orphington.

We moved to Green Acres five years ago, and after a period of years during which we had no real roots or green space, we were eager to starting planning, digging and growing.  We immediately dug the first few square garden boxes, and plenty of landscaping beds as well. The front of our house faces south, and the backyard is lovely and large with two huge Maple trees…so we decided we would food garden in the front yard.

In the first three years, we landscaped three sides of the house, developed about 100 square feet of fenced in vegetable beds and had planted numerous blueberry, raspberry and blackberry plants.

“Blue Moon” Blueberries in June.

We had also brought two babies into our family, and were quite busy here at home.

My husband Shawn had been contemplating backyard chickens for some time.  Though I was tiring of buying eight or more dozen eggs a month to keep everyone here fed, I felt that hens would be simply too much work to add onto what already seemed like an endless chore list.  But last spring, he took the plunge and ordered the days old baby chicks to be delivered, then spent the next months tirelessly working on the construction and security of a lively yellow chicken coop for our backyard.

The coop in the fall with Jamey, our second born watching the hens range.

The children really enjoyed them and although they were not laying much for quite a few months, they did start to make quick work of the endless piles of yard waste we had piled in our backyard. Then they started laying, and after a year of keeping this sweet little flock, I am sold on the value of adding hens to a household trying to work towards sustainability, food independence, and beautification. Here are a few tips, cautions and highlights from our brief experience thus far keeping backyard hens.

• The bulk of the labor involved really is building a secure and stable coop.  Pre-fabricated options abound, as do purchased plans and ideas for repurposing old items into coops.  The strategy I suggest to friends interested is to build the coop in the fall, as to avoid having chicks growing faster than you can build in the spring.

• Hens will eat almost all kitchen waste, and gladly. There are myriad techniques to harnessing the power of their manure as fertilizer; we are attempting to use a deep litter with our hens, which means cleaning out the coop only annually.  They are not particularly dirty or stinky.  They also turn all and any composting materials that they can find, and do so relentlessly.  We have seen piles that we thought would never break down turn into the most lovely, fertile soil more quickly than we ever thought possible.

• When you are leaving town, you need someone to come by daily to be sure they have clean water, feed and to collect the eggs.

• We are finding that our dogs co-exist with our hens surprisingly well.  However, we did spend the first full year managing them entirely separate, and would have continued to do so if they had not accidentally been free ranging the back yard together and forced us to see that no one cared much about the other back there.

• By one year of age, we are getting about an egg a day per bird.  But over the winter months you see a sharp decline, from around the solstice to mid-February.  One can put lights and lamps into a coop to force laying to continue, but they will in the end stop laying sooner in life because of that lack of rest.

• Fresh eggs are delicious and a worthy reward for what little time and energy the birds actually require of you.

We are often out and about in our front yard, as there is always work to be done.  We love living in Green Acres, and are happy to answer any questions or show you what we have done to start our little urban homestead.  It continues to grow, as Shawn is working on the construction of a hoop house as an addition to the existing vegetable beds…at times it is pretty wild, but there is often something to pick and eat, and we are always learning and improving our strategies.  Happy Spring, neighbors!

The garden right now: two long beds nearest are the foundation for the hoop house. Growing now are garlic, onions, peas, escarole, radishes, carrots, scallions and beets