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Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club planting day report

Back in May, I wrote about another planting day in June, on Whipple, in a smaller area. Yesterday was that day, but not on Whipple. Due to some miscommunication, I thought we had the place all lined up, but we didn’t. We ended up playing at 2948 W. 24th St instead. We had 5 adults (Cathy from my C3 class, Joanne, John, Ben and myself from the HUB) and 4 children (ages 8-10) participate. We had to do a lot more work to get into the soil this time than last time, as it was so compacted. But work we did, and we got 2 hostas, 5 coral bells, 4 bleeding hearts and 8 day lillies into the ground, as well as a flat each of prarie grass and echanaicha. Joanne also did a great job building a fence out of sticks and zipties!

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!