Oh well. Missio Dei had worked out a deal with a local housing cooperative to redevelop their commmunity garden…it had been vacant for 10 years and was storing neighborhood brush. We put time and energy getting it ready…but then a neighbor complained. You see, though Josh (our hospitality coordinator) is a coop-member, the rest of us are not. She felt that our reclamation project was co-opting the co-op garden.
We tried to explain that our intention was only to use half of the garden this year…and then help others get established in the other lots…and then hopefully transition into another garden in a year or two, but she got increasingly upset.
So, according to the co-op bi-laws, each resident is only entitled to one garden space. So they advertised to the co-op neighbors letting them each claim some space. They “graciously” allowed us to use whatever spaces were left over. Josh (the dude in our community who set this up) get’s his own spot anyhow. They decided to make him the garden coordinator. But that means we have to move two 8×8 bed and an 8×16 bed to our yard. And all the materials we put into the project won’t be reimbursed.
But this all worked out well. In the end, we’ll still have all the same amount of garden space. And we’ll have blessed Josh’s neighbors. And Josh is the garden coordinator.
And today, in order to speed up our yard prep, we decided to rent a tiller. But at the hardware store we found a used tiller for $99 that is HEAVY duty. The dude was selling it for about 1/3 its price because he got it at auction and hasn’t been able to sell it (it is hard to use). I was able to use it easily enough and clear the space in a half hour.
