Sunday, May 22, 2011

The Garden Project: Introduction

I am not really sure how to begin this story, so I will just start from the beginning, as do all novels.

There is a garden on campus that was created for The Garden Society, a club on campus where students had the chance to learn about gardening. It has been around for a couple of years, but since my time here, I have not heard much about it. It was just this club that no one really knew about and no one really knew when they got together to garden. Skip ahead to a couple months ago when I am in my weekly meeting with Slow Food on Campus (check out www.slowfoodusa.org) to understand exactly what this club is about. We are talking about projects and events come Spring since the weather is shaping up and the snow is just about gone. One of us mentions that we should team up with Garden Society to show our true values and bring knowledge to the student body. Good news and Bad news....first the bad: the couple who ran Garden Society in the past were overwhelmed with the amount of work it took to run the garden with just the two of them, so they had no plans of continuing it this season. Good news: those two people were in my history class, so I decided to jump at the opportunity to acquire the garden.
Here is the conversation:
Me: "Hey, Dick and Jane** (Names have been changed)
D/J: "Hey Audrey, how's it going?"
Me: "Good, I was wondering what you were planning on doing with the garden this year?"
D/J: "Oh, well, we are actually looking for someone to take it over; its just too much work for us!
Me: "I'll take it!"
D/J: "Seriously?? OK! Great!" (with smiles on their faces and sighs of relief)
Me: "Yea, totally. Slow Food has a bunch of people who are interested in gardening!"

So there you have it--the acquisition of the garden.

This was late March. The problem with the timing is that myself, Dick, and Jane were leaving on our wine trips in 3 days and would be gone for 3 weeks...meaning there would be no one around to help with the transition of the garden and prepping of the beds while we were away. Before leaving, the three of us met where I was given the Garden Society binder with information about past lay outs of the garden, seed information, when to plant, what to plant, where to plant, how to plant, and all the other paper work. They gave me a quick run down of what they had done for us (NOTHING!!). So basically, we acquired a garden that had not been maintained throughout the winter and had no seedlings started to be put into the ground. Myself and the members of Slow Food (SFOC) knew this would be a project for us. (Especially difficult for myself since I know very little about gardening).


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