Category Archives: Bi-weekly Updates

I suppose this post should be one of our larger Bi-weekly Update posts, but with the charter revision coming up, I’m afraid we’re all rather busy. Luckily, by midnight on Nov.1 you’ll be able to see exactly what we’re planning and doing on our charter proposal on the LFS Wiki (http://wiki.ubc.ca/Course:LFS350/Projects/2014W1/T17/Proposal). Onto the update:

Business from the last post:

• The interview with Chris was a great success! Meagan and I (Ning) met up at Save-On-Meats Diner for a quick breakfast interview. Chris laid out the logistics of his business and his work with Stephanie Nelson of Gordon Nelson Properties. He laid out the basic costs of a typical raised bed, the logistics of soil and setting up, important parts of a successful garden (like signage) and all sorts of useful advice.
• The two toolkit teams are still busily writing up their sections.
• Our perception study is pending approval from Andrew, but Dora and I will be meeting with him tomorrow to discuss some things.

New business:

• Fun facts about Ning: I used to (and still do) volunteer for an urban farm called the Edible Garden Project. When I heard that they were building a Herb Garden as well, I figured it was time to check back in on them.
• We interviewed Emily Jubenvill of the EGP over the phone, asking her important questions about herb garden roles and impacts. The EGP Herb Garden is designed to be more an inter-cultural tool than the GNH model, but we still drew some valuable insights from it.
• Our charter is almost revised and completed! Lots of big changes, least of which is that we’ll have to rename this blog.
• Susanna has approved of our idea to craft some signs for the Herb Garden for our Community Service Learning hours as Lucy (our TA) has also signed off on it. We’ll be planning a sign-making party soon as we frantically dig up old elementary school art projects in a futile attempt to remember how to make things pretty.

That’s all for now, folks!

I got so caught up in yesterday’s writing, I guess I forgot to include a proper update. So for official purposes, here’s what we’re up to:

We’re exploring the possibility of evaluating community-building aspects of the herb garden as a community garden!

• We’re conducting a review of academic literature surrounding this topic and we hope to find some frameworks or metrics that we can use. If this is successful, we’ll need to change our scope and notify Andrew.

Still working on the toolkit!

• Now that we’ve gone through the process of building a garden with Stephanie, we hope to contact Shifting Growth to get their perspective on the issue.
• We’ve divided the organization of the toolkit into two main sections: Setting Up a Herb Garden and Managing a Herb Garden. Setting Up entails most of the supplies and planning while Managing is more about sustaining interest, conducting events, and generally making sure the garden is well loved.
• We’re planning on making two brochures, one for landowners and one for community organizations, as a way for prospective partners to quickly browse through the benefits of our toolkit without having to look at the whole thing. This will hopefully help with advertising.

Our survey/interview questions are basically done!

• In light of our new approach, we’ve elected to talk to community members later, once we’ve clarified what we really want out of this project.

We’ve got big plans in store for the next update:

• Two weeks should be plenty of time to put together the basic writing and organizational aspects of the toolkit.
• We’d like to talk to Chris Reid of Shifting Growth
• We’ve already booked interviews with Susanna of GNH and Paul Taylor, one of the directors of GNH.
• We’ll need to make a decision of assessing community aspects
• We’re going to start surveying and interviewing community members: We promise.