Fall Progress Update
Things have been moving along at our St. Elmo United Methodist Church/Virginia Avenue Greenway food forest site: the church council officially gave us permission to start work on the site, thanks to Denise Shaw's work of surveying, drawing up a preliminary plan, and presenting it to the council. We have an information sign/bulletin board already built and ready for installation, just waiting to get permission from the city for set-up because of zoning regulations.
Cover crops- daikon radish, red cover, and vetch- have been seeded in strips at the site; our next step for now is to start building up organic material and killing back the grass, in preparation for some earth working in the late winter/early spring and our first big plantings. To that end, we'd like to start putting down cardboard, dead leaves, coffee grounds, grass clippings, material of that sort, so if you have some of any of the above on hand, please do either bring it by the site or let me (Jonathan) know and I can swing by and pick it up (we're going to need some old logs as well, for barriers now and hugelkultur elements in the spring). I think it would make sense for us to aim on collecting material over the next couple weeks, and then take a morning to lay and layer everything out. We’ve already got a lot committed but any excess can be routed to our second site (see below!).
Second, we’re working on getting our tree work taken care of, and hope to have that done soon so we can start work on the raised beds that we'll site where some of the cypresses are now. The other thing we need to do sooner rather than later is prepping the garage at the top of the hill: it needs a fresh coat of paint on the food forest side, and we'll need to install a water collection set-up as well.
Third, we have a second site opportunity for collaboration: the East Lake Language Association (ELLA)'s library, at 4501 13th Avenue, Chattanooga. They'd already been hoping to install a community food forest on the property there, and I'd love for us to help them out! Jazmine, the director of ELLA, and I walked and discussed the site last week, and we're thinking it can be done in a couple of stages, starting with a long but skinny strip against a fence. Before we can start killing grass, building organic matter, and planting stuff there are a bunch of vines and the like that need to be removed; they're mostly already dead so it's mainly a matter of cutting and pulling.
In the next update I’ll be sure to include photographs- at the moment there’s not much to see, just grass, but in a few weeks’ time things are going to start looking very different!
