Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Walnut Hill Community Farm




It's high time for an update on some of my garden projects. The Walnut Hill Community Farm (we've changed it from "Mini-Farm") is looking amazing. We've had about two work days a month with neighbors and volunteers from all over the city and we've built six long raised beds for the farm and nine square raised beds for the community garden. I also blogged about it on Farm to Philly.





The immediate neighbors have started to show a more sincere interest in the project, and many of them now have plots in the community garden. At the last work day we had a bunch of neighborhood kids come out and help, they had a blast shoveling compost!





We've planted cold crops, herbs, and strawberries, and the kale is almost ready to harvest! The kids in the Grower's Cooperative are starting to take initiative and farm on their own (which is the ultimate goal) and they will start selling at local businesses and the Clark Park Farmer's Market in the next couple of weeks.





We had a visit from Mayor Nutter in early April because our site was highlighted as part of the city-wide clean up day and he was really enthusiastic about the project (he even shoveled compost!).

(photo by Imanni Wilkes, The Enterprise Center CDC)



The front slope is also looking wonderful and flowering like crazy!



The next steps are to write grants to fund further construction, build a tool shed, continue to build raised beds, get woodchips delivered to mulch the paths, and figure out our water situation.

Exciting!



3 comments:

Wide Span Sheds said...

nice Blog

please keep updates in it

Unknown said...

This is probably a silly question, but have you read Farm City? Great book, you'd love it.

Here's the author's blog:

http://ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com/

Era said...

I haven't yet! Though I got it for Christmas so it's there on the shelf. I'll put it at the top of my list!