Recently in Projects Category

If you're in the Three Rivers area, drop by Huss School today for our first annual Huss Future Festival! The festival features a giant rummage sale, art vendors, live music, free fair trade coffee from World Fare and tours of the building. We've even got a ping-pong challenge and an apple barrel train!

We'll see you there!

The community garden has started harvesting in earnest! Last Thursday, 10 pounds of produce went to the local domestic assault shelter and on Saturday, 25 pounds went to the county homeless shelter. Wow! Beets, radishes, basil, lettuce, zucchini... A third local program will be part of the weekly harvest rotation as well: a free soup meal served every Tuesday and Thursday at Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you to all who have helped create this bountiful source of abundance for our community!

Each June, the Three Rivers Area Chamber of Commerce sponsors the Water Festival, a three-day event with carnival rides, live music, fireworks, crafts, children's events and SO much more. This year, for the first time, *cino had a presence with the non-profit booths to publicize what's happening at Huss School, including the community garden. The garden folks put together an amazing display, including huge stand-up veggies and some of their very own monstrous radishes that everyone kept mistaking for beets!

Rob, Paul and I had a good time hanging out in the park for a couple of days introducing people to the vision for the old school. One thing Paul found interesting as he talked with folks at the booth is that everyone knows where Huss School is, which affirms what a landmark building we've inherited. We acknowledge that the task of stewarding an historic building with so much community memory invested in it is a special task indeed, requiring a lot of care and community involvement.

We also witnessed some of the negativity that has plagued the second district neighborhoods--too many people simply have no hope for the place and were surprised when, for example, we said we hadn't had any vandalism to the community garden yet. We look forward to inspiring imaginations to the contrary!

One of our projects for this spring and summer has been figuring out how to convert a portion of the four-acre property around Huss back to wild space. We've tried to delineate the area with clear boundaries so that our neighbors won't just think we're neglecting the land, but even then, we're still getting some quizzical looks: so you're not going to mow it?

Well, we are mowing a portion of it. We have a path that goes around the entire back property for walking, an area carved out for a fire pit and a large lawn in the back corner for softball, soccer and other activities. We're also mowing the front yard and around the community garden.

But there are many advantages to letting a portion of the property go wild, including...

• Creating a habitat that's friendly to small animals, birds and insects (including butterflies!).


• Using less fossil fuel and time to maintain an area that wouldn't get adequate use as a lawn.


• Cultivating a beautiful space with visual diversity full of wild flowers, grasses and trees.


• Reducing erosion and runoff from the property with plants that have adequate root systems to absorb rain water, improving water and soil quality.


• Improving our link to the past at an historic property that would have been oak and hickory prairie centuries ago.


• Establishing an outdoor classroom where people can learn about native plants, including edible species.


• Accessing grant programs that support native plant projects and education.

We realize we'll need to be intentional about communicating our intentions in a culture where trimmed lawns are the norm, but we look forward to building relationships around innovative possibilities for a neighborhood that straddles rural and urban environments. We also look forward to the unique teaching space such a landscape will create, helping us all learn how to better care for and appreciate our native environment in an area so rich with beautiful plants and waterways.

Resources for Michigan native plants:

• Michigan State University Native Plants project


• Native Plant Species and a Landowner's Guide from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment


• Michigan Native Plants Database from the Native Plant Nursery in Ann Arbor


• Wildflower Association of Michigan

Last week, four of our six *cino interns moved into the rectory of Trinity Episcopal Church, just a short walk down Main Street from my and Rob's apartment, and a short bike ride from Huss School.

At the moment, Johnathan is working at his paid internship with White Yarrow Farm while the rest of us are enjoying the cool early-summer breeze flowing through the VG-R aerie at 37 N. Main. Liz and Marian are collecting quotes for the daily asterisk (sign up here to receive the fruits of their labor via e-mail every week day), while Paul is getting started on grant research for the Imagining Space project. Now playing: The Middle East.

Last week was a patchwork of arrivals and re-arrivals and getting-started sorts of tasks. We...

• Moved furniture and belongings to and fro.


• Cleaned the rectory and arranged it to look like a home.


• Started to stock the rectory pantry.


• Shared our first Friday evening meal together--homemade lasagna, breadsticks, salad (picked and prepared by Johnathan), rhubarb crumble (local rhubarb with Marian's neighbor's recipe), English tea (prepared by Paul).


• Attended the Sunday service and annual workday with Trinity Episcopal.


• Chipped in at the Triple Ripple Community Garden at Huss.


• Started the training process at World Fare with Marian, Paul and Johnathan.


• Walked, biked and drove around town to become more familiar with the place.

This afternoon over lunch, we'll have our first official meeting as a staff to continue fostering a cohesive sense of purpose, building relationships with one another, communicating and assigning tasks--and of course, nourishing our bodies with fresh, local, delicious, homemade food! One of the items on our agenda will be figuring out how to document this intern experiment in a way that welcomes you, our readers out there, into the story, so stay tuned for more to come...

On Thursday, the Three Rivers Commercial-News ran a great front page story covering our first planting at the Tripple Ripple Community Gardens at Huss School. Here's how Brenda McGowan, one of the garden organizers, contextualizes the work:

This is really a social justice project. The whole goal is to take the people in the community and teach them how to provide for themselves the things that they need. We all need good, healthy food. Whether you can afford it or not, it's here for you.

Saturday morning was gray and misty, but warm as we gathered to speak words of blessing and break ground for Triple Ripple Community Gardens at the Huss School property. Many denominations, ages, colors, neighborhoods and vocations were represented around our circle and each minister brought a distinctive angle to the task at hand, calling God's abundance onto the land in so many different voices.

There have been many moments since *cino's purchase of Huss School last spring that Rob and I have felt overwhelmed with gratitude at the sense that this project is being carried beyond our limited human efforts, and the garden blessing was one such moment. To be sure, God will require our practical participation in the weeks and months ahead, from recruiting young gardeners to hauling watering cans. But as Pastor Bennett reminded us all during the blessing: God provides the water. We are gifted with the raw materials and with the imagination to put them together in a new way in a new place. And in this sense, all our labor is pleasure, whether it's the welcome pleasure of a successful tomato transplant or the more difficult pleasure of trusting the Spirit to help us overcome a relational challenge.

In the moment of the garden blessing on Saturday, I believe we all glimpsed what is possible in that place beyond what we were expecting.

Watch for video footage of the community garden blessing soon. In the meantime, enjoy these photos.

River Country Journal and WLKM have run press releases about Saturday's kick off for Triple Ripple Community Gardens at the old Huss School property. There will be a blessing by local ministers at 10:00 a.m. and all are welcome to attend! Orientation for volunteers will follow.

Thanks to local media for helping get the word out and to Julianna and Brenda for all of their hard work in getting the garden started!

Posts about spring break from our Imagining Space blog made their way into the local paper this past Saturday. Check it out!

Bruce Snook, who was part of our journalism panel for the spring break trip, has published an article about the trip over at River Country Journal. Also, the images captured by a photographer who was out at White Yarrow farm when our group visited have made their way into a story about CSAs. Boy, those carrots were delicious!