Let's get composting

Thanks to Katelin & Andrew Ryan, we now have a compost tumbler for the pocket park community garden!  I tied a chain around its leg and locked it to the fence to make sure it stays put. The bin is located on the inside of the fence at the very back of the lot.

If you're new to composting like me, check out this link to a "how to compost" DIY guide.  There are lots of resources out there.  Anyone from the surrounding neighborhood is welcome to start saving their food scraps and yard waste (take it easy on the yard waste as this bin is relatively small). It might help to start by getting a gallon sized container with an air tight lid.  Whenever it fills up in your kitchen, bring it over to the lot, dump it in the compost bin and give her a few spins.  There is a locking pin that needs to be disengaged in order to spin the tumbler.  Once turned, the pin should be re-engaged.  I think there is a balance to the types of waste that should be added to the tumbler, but for now we just need to get it started with a good mix of browns and greens.

Special thanks to whoever mowed the lot too (above)! Looks like one of the watermelons has already been harvested.  Whoever it was, please let us all know how it tasted in the comments!  The strawberries are looking GREAT as well (below).  I planted some arugula in furrows between the strawberries. Arugula is a peppery leafy green that grows best in cool weather.  It should be ready to harvest in 30 - 45 days.

The black-eyed susans that Karen planted are proliferating and creating a great balance of color with the pink roses (below).  It is so nice to see a tidy garden with such potential.  Thanks for supporting this endeavor!

Summer Progress

Thanks to yesterday's efforts of many Indiana University School of Medicine volunteers, the pocket park is looking better than ever!  THANK YOU IUMS VOLUNTEERS!!!

Not only do we have our first few watermelons (play "Where's Waldo" with the watermelon below), but the generous volunteers led by second year med student, Jose Pena, performed outstanding work to cut beds, mulch, weed and maintain the lot, which was looking pretty raggedy late into the summer.  Here are a few before pictures:

 Half finished bed cutting and planting needed to be tidied up (above), and the beds needed to be weeded a bit before plating a fall garden (great idea, Jack Graves!).  And the transformation continues with enlarged perennial beds (below):

The cantaloupe and watermelon bed (below) looks fantastic for having been planted fairly late in the season.  Behind this is the strawberry bed with a few starts getting their roots on.

Four unused garden beds are clean from weeds and ready to become something great (below).  Fall planting might include arugula, spinach, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, and butternut squash.  What a bountiful harvest THAT would become!

The IU volunteer team even built a large sandbox frame for the park area in the back of the lot (above).  We just need to find some sand!  That shouldn't be hard with all the gravel and sand pits on the SW side of town!  And to top off the day, the team mulched our back fence line (below).  This multi-purpose public space is really beginning to shape up!

Thanks again to the IUMS Team from the Neighbors of 1401 Olive.  We look forward to building this relationship moving forward.

New Development on Volunteer Help

A couple weeks ago someone emailed me and offered to connect the Olive Street neighbors to a group of med students looking for a community service / beautification project.  The schedule would be tight, but I couldn't resist having 50 - 60 volunteers to put some effort into making HUGE progress of the 1401 pocket park project.  

As a part of the SEND MOU, we were asked to provide a plan for the future of the lot.  To date this had not happened, but with the tight schedule, we needed something to show the Med School Student Group. Although not all of the design features can be provided by the volunteer group, a comprehensive "master plan" was necessary to plot our course.

Over the past couple years, we've only very briefly discussed future plans.  We certainly wanted an area for kids to be off the street, perhaps a small "field" to play soccer or football, or to even shoot hoops.  We discussed providing a play area with sand box and swing set.  We also saw the value and benefit of a community garden, and simple beautification via landscaping and fencing.  Based on those core concepts, I threw together a plan which achieves those goals and while complimenting the existing vegetation on the lot:

The plan includes providing a mulched play area beneath the shade canopy of the trees toward the back of the lot while utilizing the sunny west side as the garden area.  The gardens would provide street side visual interest, while the shaded  east area would be reserved for kids to be well protected and away from the street.  A gated shadow-box style fence on the east side is both allows access and visual line of sight while providing a higher level of security to the play area from the alley.

Detailed features of the current garden design (see below) include 48" x 120" (4' x 10') raised bed garden plots, street front landscaping consisting of a decorative mulched area with low maintenance perennials such as proposed knock out roses, day lillys and hydrangea and seating features.  This area of the lot remains in the sun for most of the day.

Raised beds (above) could be sponsored (i.e. paid for) and tended to by local residents.  Seating could be salvaged and refurbished or designed and created by artistic neighbors, and perennial street plantings could be cultivated from yards within a couple block radius.  Room for nine large raised beds could result in a lot of fresh produce started in the spring of 2014.  Simple raised beds (below) could accommodate a large growing area.

The east side of the lot (below) would include a grassy play field in the center and a children's play area under the shade of the existing trees.  A large mulched area could accommodate a swing or play set and a sand box as well as seating features.  There is more than enough room to also accommodate compost and soil bins with lids to keep the contents dry.

Keeping our eyes peeled for salvaged play sets and sand boxes could make providing this feature a breeze (above).  Compost and soil bins (below left) are conceptually designed based on those features at the Youth Education Garden in the 900 block of Shelby Street (below right).

After visiting with Alan Hyslop, co-chair of the IU Med Student Volunteer Committee with Nathan Delafield, it was clear that we needed to prioritize things their group could achieve during their day of volunteer service.  We decided that their group would tend to weeding the lot, laying mulch in the front and back areas per the plan, planting some street front decorative shrubs and / or flowers, staining the existing fencing.  This work alone will really make the frontage shine and serve as a sounds stepping off point for the future of this community-based pocket park and garden.

Tentative IU Med Student Plan

Date: August 8th, 7 am to 1 pm.
Site: SENSE charter school and 1401 Olive St Pocket Park.
Numbers: ~80 volunteers from the School of Medicine; 2 head coordinators and 5 other volunteer coordinators; 10-15 other volunteers (if necessary).
Materials: 50 bags of mulch, 50 bags of top soil, bed lining, gardening tools, rakes, shovels, trash bags, gloves, trowels, trimmers, and hopefully some wood (if you needed this).
Plan: We will work on the SENSE charter school site first, making sure that the work is done there first. After we finish there (around 10-11 am or so), we will head to the pocket park and begin work there (spreading mulch, weeding, and planting flowers/plants or whatever you would like).


As we move forward, anyone with an interest in participating in the funding, construction, maintenance or use of the park should contact me to be included in digital updates as we post and issue them.

Lead testing...coming soon to a lot on Olive Street near you

As a part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Olive Street Block Club (OSBC) and SEND, the soil on the property must be tested for lead prior to use as a garden.  Let's back up a bit actually, and explain the MOU:

The 1401 lot belongs to SEND.   They own it.  Before they would allow the neighborhood group (OSBC) use the property, an MOU was drafted.  The MOU required a land use plan detailing projected improvements and alterations to the property as well as denoted responsibilities for the maintenance and upkeep of the lot after the acquisition and agreement is signed, such as mowing of the grass, monitoring the use of the property and obtaining a soil test to indicate the presence of hazardous materials.  Remember, there was a home on the property prior to it becoming a vacant lot, and that home likely had lead based paint all over it at some point.

Recognizing that lead testing is an important step prior to creating a community garden (and required by the MOU in our case), we needed to find an inexpensive (i.e. FREE!) way to get the soil tested, for we have little money at the moment to spend.  Knowing that Debra Boyer, 2012 Vice President of the Fountain Square Neighborhood Association (facebook page), has recently been active with another local garden, the Southeast Model Urban Garden across from the Fountain Square Center at 901 Shelby Street, I figured she'd be a good source.  See below for a couple pics of their garden:

Love the fence.  Basic pickets, but they're set at varying heights to create a very nice wave.

Small but effective garden plots.  I hope ours can be more sizable.

I think these are some kind of squashy / pumpkin kind of thing.

Debra pointed us toward IUPUI as a resource and is still looking on my behalf to see if the program she used is available.  I went a step further and contacted another friend who had their home's soil tested for lead a few years back.  They went through "the City."  The dreaded CITY.  What does that mean?  Well I started with the most logical choice:  Health and Hospital.  By searching for Health and Hospital Indianapolis I was pointed to their web site.  Further investigation to determine what local source would be best sent me toward the Marion County Public Health Department.  A search of their programs and services yielded this result:  The Marion County Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program.  We signed up by calling (317) 221-2155.  After confirming that they test soil for lead, we await someone to schedule an appointment to visit the site.

If any residents of Marion County are concerned that their soil may have harmful lead, don't hesitate to call the program mentioned above.  It's a great resource to have; I hope it works out for us and we can move forward from this point without needing to field an additional testing agency, it was almost too good to be true to find someone willing to do the test so quickly.

Stay tuned for a post upcoming with some examples of a few of the other urban gardens around downtown (the ones I know of at least).

Makings of a Pocket Park

Well, here we are on this beautiful Sunday afternoon in July.  It's been over a year since the Olive Street neighborhood partners formed an official group and began looking into ways to spend a small amount of grant money awarded to Scott Severns and this band of motley, south side residents.

For the record, they are (in no particular order and if I've left anyone off, let me know and I will add you to the list!):  Jason Burk, Scott Severns, Jimmy Pringle, Jack Graves, Sue Amyx , Matt & Jessica Yoder and SEND.

In the past year and a half the pocket park has been slowly inching along (in somewhat chronological order):

• The house that used to occupy 1401 Olive was condemned and torn down (sorry, no pics!  You'll have to trust us that it was a dump!)
• Scott, Matt and I built the street front decorative cedar picket fencing and the rear "shadow box" style protective fencing:

• The lot was smoothed over by some friends with a Bobcat (Gardens of Growth in Indy) and seeded by yours truly and Jack.
• We tried to install a four-sprinkler watering system connected to Sue's house, but there wasn't enough pressure to make it work.  Plus, the Summer of 2012 was too dang hot to bother trying to water anyway, so we gave up.
• Grass started growing when the temperatures cooled back down later in the year (late 2012).
• Sue, Jimmy and Jack provided much needed maintenance to weed growth and grass mowing as the season progressed.
• Matt stored the various tools and materials needed in his garage.
• Finally, a year after we started the fence project, Scott and Jason built the gate components and installed them:

• Someone left us a small pile of mulch in the middle of the inadvertent "drive lane."  Not that we wanted a drive lane, but without a gate the lot was someone's parking area for a short amount of time.  I'm sure the mulch will come in handy, I just wish whoever delivered it would have put it off to the side or actually IN the spot that was most likely to be mulched!

• So now we have a mostly grassy lot, with a protected alley side, and a long narrow open sunny area, ripe for raised planting beds.  Next step:  Find some funding and / or materials and start making the dream come alive.  More to come on the future plans for the lot...

That's it for the first installment of the 1401 Pocket Park Blog.  It's taken a year for us to get here and grant funding from local neighborhood sources to bring together this small but effective group of residents.  We hope to bring together a desire to beautify this small piece of SoPro (South of Prospect) and to create something which all participants can be proud to use and call a little piece of their own neighborhood!

Sincerely,

Jason Burk

Past Resident and Current Supporter of Fountain Square