As you may have noticed our garden along Del Mar and Los Robles needs some attention. For the last several months many members of our church in the First Impressions Team, Sustainable Garden Team and the Carbon Ring have been brainstorming ideas on what to do with it. We came up with many possibilities and then settled on a plan. Our plan is to build a Sustainable Garden.
What is a Sustainable Garden? First, it is a garden that does not use lots of water. Water is becoming more scarce in California and is moved thousands of miles to our location. To be responsible we need to remove plants that use lots of water to survive and replace them with low water use plants. Second, it is a garden that will help us live a sustainable life. If we use less water in the garden we will have water for drinking and other necessary uses. Also, we buy food that can be shipped thousands of miles raising the CO2 output into our air. If we cut down on that travel time we could reduce our carbon footprint. Using this criteria we came up with a plan.
Our plan is to design a beautiful garden with indigenous native plants along Del Mar and Los Robles. These natives would take approximately one year to acclimate to our climate and then would only need water when very hot. Indigenous native plants belong in this climate and know how to adjust to this weather. They can be beautiful and bring butterflies and birds to our grounds.
We would also re-plant the patio garden. This would be the garden where we would practice our eating closer to home. We plan to plant a vegetable and fruit garden. These crops would be used in our 3rd Sunday Lunches and our Green Project Lunches.
This is a large project that we are committed to accomplishing and will take time, labor, and money. On September 15th we sent a grant application to the UUA Funding Program to ask for assistance. We told them our plan and hope to hear positive news within two months. In the meantime, we started our Green Project Lunches on the second Sunday in September to raise our own funds. (There will be a Green Project Lunch every second Sunday of the month.) By the end of November we will have a drawing of the plan for the garden. We will display it on the Sustainable Garden bulletin board in Throop Hall. The Sustainable Garden Team will continue to meet and move this project towards completion.
