by Craig
For those of you who can’t make it out on the weekends…
And may want to get a little workout after sitting at a desk all day, we are going to start having farm happy hours a couple Mondays a month! We will be painting signs, weeding, mulching, and planting this Monday, April 15, from 6-8 pm. Please feel free to bring yourself, your loved ones, your co-workers, and your favorite liquid libations.
Dog Head Farm:
1117 Birch St
Atlanta, GA 30310
See you there!
by Craig
Hi folks — we’ve got the last few fruit trees going in the ground this Sunday, and we’d love your help with it! Several fruit trees and bushes will be going in at the Friends of English Avenue’s garden plot across from the Lindsay Street Baptist Church.
For reference, the English Avenue Historic District is where one of our mini orchards went in a few weeks ago. It is a 5 minute drive from the Georgia Dome, has probably 10% of its houses boarded up, and when HELP did a survey of 500 men in the neighborhood, 420 of them were Vietnam veterans. It is a different Atlanta over there, and I highly recommend you visit. It is an eye-opening experience, especially in light of the current discussions surrounding hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars soon to be spent on a new dome.
We will be meeting at the Techwood Community Garden at 2pm on Sunday. We’ll be meeting folks from Atlanta Union Mission, and together carpooling from there to English Ave. Please come out!
by Craig
To all of you that didn’t come out and help plant trees with us on Sunday: it was probably very nice inside your warm homes away from the snow outside. But still, shame on you.
We probably could not have picked a worse day for planting a bunch of trees, but c’est la vie. There were about 9 of us altogether, and we got 15 trees in the ground in 3 different locations in about 2 hours. Not bad! They will soon appear on the food map, but we had 2 persimmons, 2 figs, 3 pears, 6 apples, and 2 plums go in.
We cannot thank our volunteers enough for doing manual labor on the coldest day in a long time, and we owe much gratitude to those of you whose donations made these mini orchards possible in the first place. Thank you all so much!
We may have also recently received a small cache of fruit trees unexpectedly donated to us, so we will hopefully have some more orchard projects in the near future. Stay tuned!
by Craig
Woohoo! 23 new fruit trees from the ALFI fruit tree sale, purchased with your donations! Thank you all so much!
We got:
3 Arkansas black apples
1 Fuji apple
2 Gala apples
1 Stayman apple
1 Dorset Golden apple
1 Anna apple
1 Celeste fig
1 LSU Purple fig
1 Moonglow pear
1 Asian pear
1 Kieffer pear
1 Hanna-Fuyu persimmon
1 Methley plum
1 Bruce plum
2 Damson plums
1 Alapaha blueberry
1 Powderblue blueberry
1 Premier blueberry (ooh la la)
1 Britewell blueberry
We’ll be having a planting event foe these guys and gals next Sunday most likely. Details are coming, and thanks again y’all!
by aubrey
On this year’s Martin Luther King Jr Day, we took our first steps towards our new dream: public orchards in poor neighborhoods. Working with two other organizations, Friends of English Avenue and Help Org Inc, we were part of a Hands On Atlanta volunteer day project to start our first mini-orchard on Elm Street in English Avenue. With dozens of workers, we cleared debris, dug beds, mulched pathways, and generally got the lot spic and span. The only work we have left is to finally plant the trees once they arrive later this month.
The neighborhood has been extremely enthusiastic and supportive. In fact, passersby we chatted with often complained that they didn’t know if they would be able to eat ripe fruit from the trees because everyone would pick them clean and eat all the fruit before it ripened. I heard this as a challenge to plant enough trees to out-grow the neighborhood’s demand for fruit.
We have been offered a few other lots to plant fruit trees on in the same neighborhood. While we dot our i’s and cross our t’s with the details, keep an eye open for chances to help us out in the future with this new and rewarding venture. And extra special thanks to all those that chipped in to get us the money we needed to make this possible!
