Oh my gosh we just got all of our pictures back from our gardening project this spring and they look awesome! For the past few months we have been planning to do a garden in Altgeld Gardens, which is a housing area on the far South Side of Chicago, IL. Joe Lamp'l, or joe gardener as many know him, designed a beautiful garden for us. The group at Altgeld wanted a garden to maintain, prune and grow a variety of things in but lacked the resources to implement the first initial large planting that was necessary. We knew they would be a great group and really deserved the help so we started planning. It took about eight weeks of planning and
60 people on 
site planting, but we got it done in one day. It was great too because the entire day there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Which was beautiful, but to be honest left a few of us little pinker then we would have rather been. Brent and myself got things started a few months ago and with some donated green goods from Lowes and the vounteered hours of around 25 individuals besides the 35 that came from Fiskars, we "Greened" this 96'x134' plot. The poeple who run the housing offices at Altgeld were amazing throughout the planning process and the community really helped us on the actual day of planting. There were around 15 trees, hundreds of perennialls and annuals, 10 raised beds with vegetables and herbs. Putting in those darn raised beds was sort of difficult, they needed to be built 18 inches high! There was even a community gathering area that was put in the middle with benches and a bird bath in the center, it really livened up the place. You can see more pictures at http://www.fiskars.com/content/garden_en_us/Garden/Community/Green-Up. There are pictures videos, it was a great experience, hopefully we get the opportunity to do something like this again!
I will keep you updated with how things are going wiht the garden now that the Altgeld neighborhood is taking care of it and things will really be blossoming soon especially those crabapple trees:) Aw it's going to be georgeous!
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