These photos were taken of the Troost Village Community Garden.

Things have been going well. We continue to organically organize, which means problems are sometimes slow at being solved. But they seem to get resolved eventually. We had a cookout in the garden last month in June and a face to face meeting for the first time in months. It was good to connect with everyone and feel more cohesive. At the last meeting someone had a cute idea of creating a manual water pump using a stationary bicycle to generate power. Too bad we don’t know how to make that happen….yet!  

We are fortunate to have enough people supporting the garden that it gets watered and taken care of daily. My day for watering and maintenance is Wednesday mornings. 

All these photos were stolen from artist Eric Klem. He has a tumblr you can follow at urbangardenskc! 

  11:58 am  |   July 5 2012   |  4 notes  

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.

  1:32 pm  |   May 9 2012   |  1 note