More About Fall

This November has really been warm: it was up in the 60's and sunny again last Saturday. At 3:00 I decided to take a bike ride: down Outer Drive, thru Rouge Park (to check on the new statue) to Dearborn via a bit of Hines Drive and the new bike path. I stopped off at Starbucks at about 4:10. Some things don't change in Fall even if it is in the 60's. It gets dark and early. I got home around 5:20. It wasn't twilight, it was way darker than that. I should have started at 2:00. Thank goodness the traffic was light (no pun intended).

My garden is down to some scraggly Swiss chard and one collard plant with leaves as large as a tennis racket. But this Tuesday was the Garden Resource Program's Fall Potluck and Planning meeting. It was a gathering of gardeners from all over the city at the 4H Center. ( I still can't believe that there's a 4H Center on the near eastside, south of Gratiot at 5710 McClellan Street. Look it up on Google Maps.) Even though winter is ahead of us, it was a large, diverse, enthusiastic group fresh from a great summer of gardens. This season the Garden Resource Program distributed 48,000 packets of seeds and over 200,000 plants to over 850 community, school, and family gardens within Detroit. There were over 3500 adults and 7400 kids involved and they produced and sold over 11 tons of fresh vegetables, all within Detroit. There were 40 workshops ranging from gardening (pest control, composting, seed starting) to cooking (bread making, west African cooking, making garden fresh pizzas) to vegetable preservation (pickling, canning, freezing and dehydrating). The potluck was a mixture of everything in the city: neighborhoods, ages, nationalities. We reviewed what we did the last year to see what we did well and what we could do better. The program grew by 40% this year. Their big question was how they could make it even bigger next year.

The PALM meeting was on Sunday. The sites are coming along well: some of the sites even know what their meals will be. This year most of the sites have pools we can access. The total mileage of the route will be 253 miles (spread over 6 days). We'll be going by lots of lakes (with swimming) and we'll have shade. A tentative route has been laid out and Andy will be getting it out on MapMyRide soon. I'll be getting with the printer about the 2010 application in the next couple of weeks. Summer is here before winter has even started.