Monthly Potluck, April 27th: “We gathered in the (GANG) garden . . .”

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.

Green Acres: Rotating Potluck March Meeting Report

Howdy neighbors!

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.

Over and out!

Green Acres scribe Ann Kreilkamp

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