Urban Garden Suggested

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I am a member of the Cool Cities Group.
I received a copy of an e-mail with an idea about having an urban
garden at the cultural arts center nurished by water
collected in rain barrels.

Such a wonderful project would be a public
demonstration of Greensboro's commitment to practical
conservation efforts.


The following is a portion of the e-mail I received and is posted at this blog with the author's permission.

for a variety of reasons linking my research and my
life, I've hooked up a couple of rainbarrels at my
house so I can water my garden without having to use
city water--something important to do during a
drought. and it looks like our region will be or may
be drought prone, as predicted by global climate
models (due to global warming). I have watered my
vegetable garden and compost heap for the past month
without turning on the city taps.

so: WHY AM I BOTHERING YOU WITH THIS?

two things: first, I saw on a commercial that our
university ag people were involved in research on
drought resistant crops. second, the other day I was
at the cultural arts center while my son was having a
sax lesson. It was lightly raining and it occurred to
me that a gutter and rainbarrel system would be very
easy to hook up to the center to capture all that roof
water (I can capture 500 pounds of water in about a
half an hour with a rain like we had last evening,
from one downspout making use of 20 feet of
gutter--multiply that by all the gutter feet capturing
all the rain on that huge roof and you can imagine the
efficiency and the savings). if you have been in the
center, you know how HUGE that roof is and how much
water it could capture and store. that water then
could be used to water an URBAN DEMONSTRATION GARDEN
that could easily be set up on the grounds
there--there's plenty of grassy area that could be
converted. the food grown could be donated to urban
ministries or something and NCAT STUDENTS could
monitor and run the project--this would be highly
worth doing even if the garden could not play any role
in the drought project: but it occurs to me that part
of the garden could be watered, part not watered as
part of the research on drought resistance, vegetables
could be produced and people could see the thing in
action, in the middle of the city (urban gardens etc).
Given the absolute necessity of going green, this
could be part of the promotional campaign and might be
hooked up to the COOL CITIES campaign in which many
of the country's mayors are participating.--I believe
A and T is playing some role currently in a project to
monitor our carbon consumption, a project which is I
think connected to the CC initiative.

what do you think?

Greg Meyerson
Critical Theory
Dept. of English