SierraScape February - March 2011
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by Ginger Harris
Urban Agriculture Committee Chair

Some of our members were lucky enough to be accepted into Gateway Greening's 2-month training program on how to promote urban agriculture.

Since our committee changed its meeting date & time last autumn from one Thursday evening per month to 1 morning meeting every other week, we have been "meeting" while working at Gateway School on N. Jefferson Ave. ("Working" means maintaining the large greenhouse and helping students plant and transplant as part of their science curriculum.)

When City schools closed for the holidays, we used our Dec. 21 work time to meet with Mr. Ernest Bradley (Program Educator) and Ms. Patrice Dollar (Regional Educator), both with Lincoln University's Urban Impact Center. They were impressed with our members' initiatives and offered to use their contacts to help us get approvals from officials and access to materials. They will primarily focus on Sheila Pryor's backyard and community gardens in Pine Lawn and Allona Morris' farmers' market in Velda City. Audrey Wattler's community garden in Fenton is far enough along that their intervention is probably not needed, but our committee stands ready to help Audrey and any other member who wants to initiate a community agriculture effort.

At our Dec. 21 meeting, member Laurie Veatch distributed cuttings from a fig tree that each of us took home to root. Most of our fig twigs now have leaves and are working on producing roots.

We agreed to change our scheduled meeting times to 9:30 a.m. Our meeting dates will still be the following Tuesday mornings at Gateway School: Feb. 1, Feb. 15, Mar. 1, Mar. 15, Mar. 29, Apr. 12, and so forth. Let me know if you want to join us in person, so I can give you specifics on how to get there. If you want to join us in spirit, please go to connect.sierraclub.org/Team/Urban_Agriculture_Committee and sign up for our team!