Minutes 3/30/06

Here are the minutes from March's meeting.

Mark Your Calenders!

To Be Determined...

Soon there will be a post directing where to drop off tool donations and/or personal tools you'd like to contribute for use in the garden. Please please please!! label your tools clearly to ensure their safe return. Any lost/stolen/damaged tools will be reimbursed by the garden.

Josh Hayes

Josh spoke to the group about the possibility of using horses to plow our garden. This suggestion was met with enthusiastic responses from the group. He has contacts that may be able to do this soon; more information to be posted by those involved. If you are interested in Josh's work with draft horses, look up Healing Harvest Forest Foundation. This foundation aims to promote sustainable logging.

Guidelines/criteria

Alyssa went over the garden guidelines. The group had no complaints. She also passed around a tentative membership application to allow for suggestions from the group. Finally, membership criteria will be posted on this blog. Please take the time to read over what Alyssa posts and provide comments.

Eric had additional comments regarding guidelines from the legal point of view. In order to maintain non-profit status, we need to be careful about income guidelines for members. Essentially, members will need to let us know what tax bracket they fall into. Based on income, members may be eligible for a free plot. Also, members who exceed the tax bracket we are targeting as a non-profit may need to donate a row or two of their plot to a foodbank or other non-profit organization. I believe Eric may be able to more consisely explain the legal stuff to those interested

Garden layout

Andy has been working on a garden layout. She presented what she has come up with; it looks awesome! The plots she has designed are quite versitile. We will be able to provide members with an option for a half or quarter plot if they are interested. The artwork Joe Bigley will be doing has a prominent location and the footpaths are designed so that the apartment complex will have access and won't be tromping over plots. Looks great Andy. =)

EarthFare

EarthFare is working with the fundraising committee. They will be allowing us to have booths in the store to advertise/promote the garden on Earth Day. Also they are donating $500 dollars. Additionally there are ways that we can earn more money from Earthfare; for example, if customers use recycled bags they are given $0.10 per bag. We can bag groceries and rack up the cash. I'd personally appreciate if the fundraising committee could have someone post specific stuff about this so members can help out if needed. Being directed is often easier than taking initiative.

Maverick Farms

Are interested in letting us contribute/benefit from a silent auction which is happening April 29th.

Fundraising Committee

Over $500 dollars was raised in the March Fundraiser. Yay! They are also working on a grant from Wal-Mart for $500.

Earth Day

I don't know if I wasn't paying attention or what, but Earth Day is coming up before our next group meeting and we should definitely be having a party. Any ideas?

Leolastreetgarden.org

You can now modify your settings on this webpage if you want to receive notifications of posts in your email. Log in, go to ?my account? under your user name, then to ?my notify settings?. Thanks, Karen for your work with the website. It's made it very easy to communicate.

That's about it. I'd really appreciate it if someone wouldn't mind posting how the Saturday workdays go for those who are unable to attend (I work on Saturdays).

Until next time!

Grow peace,
~katie