Members Forum

The Scholarship Committee for the Weeders Garden Club made an investigative trip down to the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of Philadelphia to review a possible grantee: Fair Amount Food Forest run by Michael Mulbauer. Fair Amount Food Forest is a community based, publicly accessible and educational garden. A food forest is a gardening technique which works within a woodland eco system and incorporates trees, shrubs, and perennials to produce human food. The committee was very impressed by Mr. Mulbauer who not only supervises the garden plans, but also the volunteers, the outreach to the community, the educational programs on site as well as in the local schools. All food produced by the garden is either free to the neighbors or donated to the local pantry. 

We then went on to My Neighborhood Project, the Norris Square urban garden project in Kensington, where we met with Andrea Bilbioni, the new director. The committee was concerned that the transition of new staffing had meant erosion of the project but found, instead, that tremendous progress had been made in the last 2 years. There are new structural gates, the education garden was in fine shape and had survived the neighboring developer's damage, the community education program is stronger than ever, the produce stand is a summer time fixture in the community now and now also includes a teaching pergola, and the main garden, Las Parcelas will be undergoing renovations. But in the meantime, it looked better than ever, also with new structural gates and a new mural honoring the women who began the project.

Currently Norris Square has 60 lots under it's umbrella, and all but 18 have had their title resolved in the project's favor, and 17 of the remaining are on schedule to be resolved in the projects favor by the end of this year.

The photo here is of our group, left to right, Sue Heckrotte, Ellie Penniman, Marilyn Sprague, Patty Minehart, Sonya Driscoll, Nancy Evans as photographer, and Michael Mulbauer.  As you can see, despite it being April 2, it was so extremely cold that we neglected to take a photo at Norris Square.