OT: #EATING Flint with Vincent Smith gardens update

Hello everyone

Hope you are enjoying the summer. Just wanted to give you an update about our garden project.  For those of you who don't know, some of us Michigan athletes started a project called #EATING.  We use technology to connect U of M alumni, athletes, and fans and build gardens with neighborhood youth.  We started in Florida in my hometown of Pahokee and now we are in Flint.

To learn more you can read about us at teamgardens.org

and share our gofundme link: feedflint.org

We went to the Mission Flint meeting- which is the government task force in charge of the Flint recovery efforts.  There were representatives from the Govenors office, the Dept of Health and Human Serivces, Dept of Civil Rights, Dept. of Education, Agriculture, Police and more.  Pretty much everyone important. We presented our plan and they were very receptive to our ideas to increase the access to veggies. 

Here I am in Flint with some tomato plants, maize and Blue represented.

Here I am with the first rabbit we caught in the garden.

We had great help from the Alumni in May to get us started and got a huge raised bed (called a huggle) built.  We are continuing with some help from some U of M Flint graduate students and some local volunteers and planning bigger days comming up.

This is me planting some peppers that our down the street neighbor brought over..

What you are looking at below is a huggle bed. We learned about them from a Lecture at U of M School of Natural Resources. This first picture is the bed diagram and the second is our bed. the logs are in the middle and it decopmoses, retains water (important for Flint) and creates really rich soil. Since it is a curve, it increases the growing space by 3 times that a flat bed of the same dimensions would have.

This is our Huggle bed.  We put a fence up because a woodchuck was eating everything.  The wood was see has been burried more to make platforms/terraces for the vegetables.

This is me with our down the street and U of M Alumni neighbor and satalite #EATING garden further on the East side.  He is showing me tomato pruning techniques.

This is in the early days of planting when we first got our raised cedar beds.  We put two on each side for each neighbor family to get their own vegetables.

The main part of our work this summer has been to battle invasive species called Japanese Knot wood.  The knot wood will take over the entire yard and could ruin the garden forever once it takes hold. It already took over one lot and we did not want to use pesticide so we used a labor intensive process to get rid of the stuff!  It involved a lot of digging but it was important as it can ruin the vegetable patches.