We’ve just complete the first workday on the site of the new Riverside Community Garden – at least the first workday that involved anyone other than me!  When the weather report looked a bit sad when I got up this morning and it did drizzle on and off all morning I have to hand it to the ten elementary school volunteers from Westminster – they were real troopers!

Fred Conrad from Atlanta Community Food Bank arrived on-site at 8:45 a.m. with a van and trailer loaded with tools and supplies.  This man is serious about gardening!  Before I could even get my shoes on and cross the street he had already started tilling the garden site!

These kids are the greatest!  The rain didn’t get them down, the thorny brush piles and heavy Georgia clay didn’t get them down.  We really lucked out and had some hard workers to get our community garden started off right.

There were tons of downed limbs and brush that needed to be moved to the rear of the property into piles and the boys got right to work at it.

The girls on the other hand, helped to remove the grass, roots and debris from the newly tilled soil.

After a break, everyone joined in and double dug the entire garden area which isn’t very easy if you haven’t done it before!  The plot is looking really healthy and with some amending this week and another round of tilling (thank you, Fred) next week, we will be ready to begin planting!

A huge thank you goes out to the students and staff volunteers from Westminster School for spending their morning helping to get the Riverside Community Garden off the ground.  I hope you will all come back and join us again next year, I promise it will be a lot more fun!

I’ll have a lot more photos to share from today as soon as I get them back.  I hope you’re getting excited, folks!  The new community garden is coming together fast and we’re going to need you to make it as fantastic as it can be!

First, let me say Happy Mother’s Day to all of the mothers in Riverside and beyond.  Now on with the update…

With today’s work I have now transformed the new community garden site from this:

to this:

While that may not seem like a huge accomplishment I should tell you that the grass and overgrowth in that yard was up to my shoulders before I started this morning.  Thanks to a trip to Home Depot made by Barry this morning, we’ve now got a few more tools to make the work a lot easier to manage.

TUESDAY NIGHT MAY 12, 2009:  Come join other members of the Riverside neighborhood as we have a meal together and a great time at Bone Garden Cantina all to support the work of the Atlanta Community Food Bank.  20% of your tab goes to the ACFB!  For more info or to RSVP, email Michael Nolan.

Hey folks, great news!  Thanks to Fred at the Atlanta Community Food Bank, we will be breaking ground and having our first workday on the site of the Riverside Community Garden next Wednesday May 13, 2009.  Fred is coming armed with tools and a small army of high school volunteers to help whip the lot into shape.

As of today we have verbal commitments for 13 plots in the garden which isn’t half bad considering we haven’t even got a garden yet!  The word has already spread beyond our neighborhood too. I’ve had emails and calls from as far away as Sandy Springs with people wanting to find out more about what we’re doing over here in Riverside!

I look forward to working with you all in the new Riverside Community Garden soon!  If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me and I will get back to you as soon as humanly possible.

If you are off work on May 13th and want to help, email me or just stop by the site at 1970 Hollywood Road NW to see how you can get involved!

The site we are currently working toward turning into the first Riverside Community Garden may not look like much right now but it is full of potential.  We plan to meet this week with Fred Conrad from the Atlanta Community Food Bank to begin the clearing process and finally turn this site into a thriving garden for Riverside!

What follows are a few photos of the location.  Click any image for a full size photo.

Want even more photos?

Read the rest of this entry »

I just wanted to  post a brief message to welcome you all to the brand new website for the Riverside Community Garden in the Riverside Neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia.

As of today our new community garden is still in the planning stages but we are hard at work to get things underway and plan to break ground on our new community garden site very soon.  We;re bound and determined to make it in time for the 2009 growing season!

We hope you will bookmark this page and stay with us as we embark on this exciting new journey.  There will be plenty of photos of our progress and we want to encourage you to leave comments and suggestions as well as any questions you might have about Riverside Community Garden!

Thanks for stopping by!