Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club at Carrillo’s, planting day report

As I’ve written about before, today was planting day for the Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club at the Carrillo’s corner store, and the day couldn’t have been better, with beautiful sunshine and temps in the 70s.

On Thursday, Sarah Kaplan and I picked up the plants and tools at the Chicago Center for Green Technology, provided to us by Greencorps, through my involvement with the Chicago Conservation Corps. We each had a full bike trailer on the way home, with the wind at our backs. Fun!

Today we had a great turn-out, with Mr. and Mrs. Carrillo and their daughter Laura Rodriquez and Laura’s husband Rick, a neighbor from the 2400 block of Whipple, Mars (from Wicker Park, who found about the event through this website) and her mother (from Nebraska), and 5 of us from the HUB Housing Co-op, where I live.

We had 24 1-gallon pots, 3 each of 3 kinds of daylillies, 3 each of 2 kinds of hostas, 3 each of 2 kinds of bleedings hearts and 3 coralbells, and one flat of echanacia.  I was envisioning planting all of these is a fairly small area, removing the grass to do so, giving a really big impact in one dense area, or perhaps two smaller dense areas (the store is on the corner so has parkway in two places).  What actually happened was a sort-of dense area around one tree with 3 hostas and about 10 echanacias (these with no grass in-between, with 3 bleeding hearts nearby, planted in holes surrounded by grass (we didn’t take out hte grass except right where we planted), and then non-dense planting of all the rest.  Two or three trees had about 3 plants around each, with echancias to fill in, and some of the bleeding hearts ended up sort of off by themselves in the grass.

What’s really interesting about this in retrospect is that when a neighbor sees a full-on large-scale parkway garden, they may think it’s beyond their skills, experience or financial other means.  when they see two bleeding hearts in an otherwise solid stretch of 50 sq ft of grass, maybe that feels more accessible and they can do something like that themselves, without anything from me or other neighbors or the City.  That would be really cool!

Another thing about the day that was really cool was the amount of conversation that happened between neighbors.  Some of them came over to our place to see our compost and rainbarrels and talk about greenroofs and other goodness.  I really look forward to seeing these folks again, and I’m excited about the connections that were formed.

So we’re going to do another planting day in June, on Whipple, in a smaller area.  I need to check my calendar and the put in another order with Marissa.

Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club update – May 19th is planting day!

Since my last update about my Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club C3 project update, I’ve spoken with Laura about the corner store being our first planting location on May 19th and with Marissa about ordering supplies from the city. Yay! Please let me know if you can come that day. I’ll be announcing the time once I know when I can pick up the supplies.

Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club update

I was in last fall’s Chicago Conservation Corps leader class, and wow, does it ever seem like the winter’s been long, with respect to my project. Don’t get me wrong, I love winter. Anyway, just wanted to report a wonderful conversation with folks at my local corner store tonight.

I don’t speak much Spanish, and the owners don’t speak much English, but I go in there all the time and we pretend we’re communicating. We’ve talked in the past about them selling recycled paper products and also about the possibilities of me getting ahold of free plants to beautify the parkways in the neighborhood. We’ve talked about it a couple of times, but never (until tonight) with any actual communication taking place. :-)

So tonight I went into the store with a 4-pack of recycled toilet paper to show them, and ask them to stock. We we around and around in circles between me and the wife and the husband, without anyone really knowing what we were talking about. Eventually they called their daughter to come translate. She explained to her folks and thought that they’d be able to get recycled products from their regular supplier. We exchanged phone numbers and some more chit chat, and then …

her mom talked about the free plants I’d talked about before. So I explained a bit about C3 and the East Village parkways and how we could do that in our neighborhood as well. Turns out she’s on the board of the Little Village Development Council, or something like that, and can see big visions of doing the whole street. I’m all for that, and also am realistic that sometimes small projects go smoother than big ones, so I talked about doing one parkway, and then another, and then another. She suggested the corner store as the first site! Awesome!

So now I need to get everything in gear for supplies we need and then pick a date for planting!

How to Disappear by Pete Leki

Please go read this very short book by Pete Leki: How to Disappear. I love it. I’ve also been working on a wiki with Michael here How to Disappear Wiki. We’re not sure yet what’ll come of the wiki project, but we’d really like to see this book widely read.

Green Roofs

I met with Kevin from Xero Flor America, LLC tonight.  The name is a bit confusing because their website is xeroflora.com.  Anyway, they’re the leading contenders for suppying our green roof.  A green roof means growing stuff up there.  Not flowers or anything, but sedum.  Sedum is a succulent that’s ideal because it can hold a lot of water, but is also very drought resistant.  The whole point of having a green roof is to reduce stormwater runoff.  Well, that’s one of the points.  Here in Chicago when we have heavy rains, the water treatment plants can’t handle all of the volume in our combined storm water and sewage system so we release raw sewage into the river.  That’s bad, obviously.  So here at the HUB (my co-op) this year we’re going ot install a green roof, which should vastly reduce the amount of runoff we have.  We’re also depaving part of our concrete courtyard to plant a rain garden, which is native grasses that grow really deep roots so then can absorb a lot of water.  Water for the rain garden will come from our disconnected downspouts as well as our rainbarrels.  Wow, we’re doing a lot!  We’ll see how it goes.  Anyway, let me know if you have experiences with Xero Flor.  Thanks!

Digital Excellence – Environmentally Sustainable Best Practices Improve the Well-Being of All Neighborhoods

I recently posted a link to the Ten Principles for Digital Excellence. Here’s one I particularly like:

7. ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE BEST PRACTICES AND INNOVATIONS IMPROVE THE HEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF ALL NEIGHBORHOODS. The tools of the information age must adhere to and support the highest levels of environmental and economic sustainability. The city should use the new network as a means to disseminate and capture information vital to improving the sustainability of our city, such as gathering air and water quality data and improving transportation choice. Economically and environmentally sustainable processes for disposal and recycling of outdated electronic materials should be supported by the City and technology vendors in all communities, particularly those low-income areas traditionally targeted for the potentially harmful disposal of used and toxic computer hardware. The City and technology vendors should support the creation of neighborhood-based recycling and refurbishing initiatives for environmental remediation and job creation.

Digital Excellence

PRINCIPLES OF THE CHICAGO DIGITAL ACCESS ALLIANCEThe following principles have been adopted under the Campaign for a Community Benefits Agreement. We believe these principles should guide the development of the wireless network and the opportunities that emerge from its formation.

more …

Uganda in Chicago

I met with Harish Patel this morning.  He’s one of the organizers of Project FOCUS, which has a photography exhibit on now at UIC in Chicago.  Harish and friends (he’s a 21 year old college student) were inspired by Invisible Children, a documentary by other young people, about the child soldiers in Uganda.  Harish and his group then went to Uganda and facilitated Ugandan children’s creation of art, photographs of some of their life experiences.  If you’re in Chicago, go see the exhibit.  Good stuff.

Neighbors Project

Via west north is the Neighbors Project here in Chicago. An excerpt from their Neighbor’s Manifesto:

I call on the urban generation to fearlessly pursue our passions and principles in order to inspire and engage the rest of the country to come out of isolation and rejoin the local and national conversations. This manifesto is the embodiment of my hope in a cultural evolution towards an urban future.

I’ve been expressing for a while now that I think the future of humanity is in the cities.  I have some close friends that espouse a kind of “back to the land” philosophy that seems to take them to rural, or semi-rural places.  While I do see that we need to have a more intimate connection with the natural world (hence my involvement with the Chicago Conservation Corps), that natural world, including food production, is also right here in the city.  It’s close-by and doesn’t require burning fossil fuels to get to it.

Amtrak tickets on sale for new service across Illinois

Great news in Illinois about passenger rail. The State has doubled it’s financial committment to rail in the State which has resulted in a huge expansion of passenger service. From Midwest High Speed Rail Association:

… Tickets have gone on sale for the new Amtrak Illinois “Lincoln Service” trains on the Chicago –
Springfield – St. Louis corridor. Similar announcements have been made for new service on the Carbondale and Quincy lines.