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The UrbanHarvest STL downtown community garden has come to life this spring in its inaugural growing season! Now into summer the garden is thriving with 6′ tall sunflowers, local art and all kinds of food. The gardeners are enjoying fresh, organic greens, kale, cucumbers, basil, green beans, snap peas, potatoes and tomatoes to name a few.
Located about 1 block north of City Museum on Koken Manufacturing’s property, 25+ residents are growing food, herbs and flowers for themselves, and collectively growing several garden plots for McMurphy’s Grill, through a partnership with St. Patrick’s Center.
Local artist Claire Frandsen is displaying her NOK sculptures in the flower beds, a lovely addition to the garden! An urban pumpkin patch is well underway, stay tuned for details on how to harvest a pumpkin from our patch this fall.
If you live or work downtown and are interested in gardening please contact UrbanHarvest STL to be placed on the waiting list.
Spring is in the Air
2012 is our inaugural growing season at the downtown community garden. Over 25 downtown residents have signed up for plots and have started planting. The weather has been anything but consistent, but the seeds are sprouting, and we are very much looking forward to our first harvest.
If you are interested in leasing a garden plot, please contact us to be placed on the waiting list. And, if you are interested in volunteering is some capacity, we can always use a hand!
2011 – ‘Building from the Ground Up’
It’s been a fantastic year, with many milestones to celebrate. In 2011, we organized the community around a downtown garden, were successful in raising funds to support the development of the garden, designed and built phase one of the garden.
We commenced construction on the urban lot in August, and regularly spent weekends through November laying pavers, digging, building raised beds, mulching and more digging. We had 20+ amazing volunteers join us in this effort, together we logged over 350 hours of volunteer time during garden work days!
I am pleased to say that we have the ‘main street’, community patio, 4 rain barrels and 18 raised garden beds complete and ready for spring gardening. All of the raised beds have been reserved by volunteers, we are currently keeping a waiting list for interested gardeners.
Our next step is to build a shed over the winter, plant ornamentals in the spring and build an urban pumpkin patch in late spring. In the meantime, we will reconvene our group of gardeners after the new year to start planning our harvest schedules so we are ready to start planting in March!
Happy Holidays all, and looking forward to 2012 in the garden!
It’s Starting to Look like a Garden!
We had a great group of volunteers this weekend, the raised garden beds are built and installed on the garden site! We are expecting the soil to be delivered in the next few weeks so we can fill the beds and get some garlic in before the first frost.
A special shout-out to Christian and his young friends from Circus Harmony who brought their trailer and were eager to help. They loaded up the raised beds in the trailer, tansported them across the sizable lawn and placed them in the garden. I don’t know what we would have done without them, and it was fun to have children involved in the garden.
Let’s Build Some Beds
The pavers are layed, the stone patio is in place, the sloped land has been leveled, the salvaged lumber has been delivered – now let’s build some garden beds (finally, the fun stuff). We can use all the help we can get, so stop by the garden this Saturday if you are free…did I mention power tools!
When: Saturday 24 September
Where: 1631 Martin Luther King Drive
Time: 9am
Please RSVP to urbanharveststl@gmail.com if you plan on attending. Hope to see you there!
Urban Harvest STL on the Radio!
If you listen to Cityscape on St. Louis Public Radio 90.7 KWMU, then hopefully you caught the broadcast last Friday on Urban Farming. Producer Libby Franklin composed a fantastic story featuring the downtown community garden amongst other great urban agriculture projects in the area.
You can listen to it here, it is titled ‘September 16, 2011 – Seg. B Sound Bites with Sauce Magazine’ and can be found under ‘Recent Archives’
