It's Ours!!

Well on May 20, the lot became ours! Sooooo exciting to be part of something of great potential on many levels. First thing we moved forward with was the clean up! A house once stood where the lot is  and turned into dirt, weeds and garbage. People feel that they can dump their mattresses, tv's and garbage here. The city of Newark, helped tremendously with the clean up and trash removal. They did a wonderful job, big shout out to them!! Guess what? A few hours later and an empty speaker was sitting in the lot!! We removed it and the lot has been staying pretty clean this past few days.

A fence needs to go up and then we can get to work! In the meantime, we talked about putting up those orange construction type fences and putting a "Coming Soon" sign. That should deter people from throwing / dumping garbage and also letting the neighbors that a garden is in the works.

Proven Forces behind Twitter

What started off as a simple tweet to Newark's mayor Cory Booker about a North Newark urban farm, quickly turned into 3 tweeters from North Newark joining in conversation about starting one for our neighborhood.

After some online research, we found out about the city's Adopt-a-Lot program. The program encourages us to beautify our community by offering residents an annual lease of $1 on city-owned empty lots. Who can pass that up? For $1 we can make a difference in our neighborhood's appearance but more importantly help eachother with living healthier! We moved forward with our plan and "signed" our lease on May 20!!

Twitter is where it began, I have to give them a shout and of course plug North Newark Urban Garden's twitter page. Follow us, we follow back!

Attempting to link all accounts

We have adopted a lot on 3rd Ave and Garside St to create a community garden.  The community garden is still in its baby stages.  In the meantime, to get the word out, we have created twitter and facebook pages which you can follow at:

www.facebook.com/NewarkUrbanGarden
www.twitter.com/NwkUrbanGarden
www.youtube.com/NewarkUrbanGarden

I am currently testing tweeter feed to ensure that all the links work, and I want to be able to update both status at once, to save time and energy.  If you have any information to give us about how to maintain, sustain, and care for a garden, we would greatly appreciate it, you can share it with us at NewarkUrbanGarden@gmail.com.

If you would like to volunteer to make this happen, and/or have any ideas, please contact us at any of our pages or the e-mail listed above.

Thank you from the cofounders of North Newark Urban Garden.