Sprout

Troost Village Community Garden Update

May 2012

This year we continue to struggle with challenging schedules. A facebook group has provided us with a communication method in between impossible-to-schedule meetings and each person works independently in the garden when they can. In many ways our garden is a grassroots effort built off of chaos theory. If a plant is transplanted, it’s because someone decided to do it and it happened.

We have continued watering from the 500 gallon rain tank, which has provided some challenges due to the long distance the tank is from garden. We dug a trench and buried a plex pipe, which means we no longer have to walk as far to water the garden. Just connect the garden hose to the plex pipe and save yourself having to drag a hose an extra 50 feet. We still need to find ways to make our watering system more convenient. It takes approximately 25 minutes to fill up a 5 gallon water bucket with rain tank water, which we then use to hand water the garden. It should be noted that last year we had a drip irrigation system setup, however, we did not have enough water pressure from the rain tank to make it feasible.

Newly added to the garden this year is a row of individual garden plots. We wanted to give gardeners their own space to experiment, while leaving the community crop space for group planned-decisions and workdays.

Note: Most photos pictured are from the 2011 Garden Season, with the exception of the plex pipe photo.