Milwood Neighborhood Assoc.

Hey there, neighbors!

For those of you who have been following the progress of Adelphi Acre Community Garden and are interested in a timeline update, please keep reading, otherwise go about your business.

UPDATE/RECAP

As many of you know, our steering committee has been working closely with the City of Austin over the past year to help get this garden started.  We have encountered more speed bumps than any of us ever thought possible, but we kept at it, and finally, after countless revisions have completed our final application for the License Agreement.  This may all sound like stuff we’ve said before, but there has been a tremendous amount of effort that went into this process, and numerous (different agreements) that had to be reached with various departments of the city for this to take place including:

• Memorandum of Understanding with the Sustainable Food Center (Non-profit sponsorship/liability insurance) (complete)
• Application to be accepted as an officially endorsed garden by the Sustainable Urban Agriculture and Community Garden Program (Parks and Recreation Department) (complete)
• Grant application to the Neighborhood Partnership Program (Public Works)  (complete/approved for funding)
  • This was a huge effort and we are thankful for all the help in planning, donations, and volunteers that contributed to our neighborhood match
• Neighborhood Partnership Program Agreement (complete)
• City License Agreement (submitted for final review)

 THANK YOU!

We cannot express how thankful we are for your constant support, and patience in this long permitting process. The overwhelming support of our neighborhoods, local businesses, churches, scouting organizations, the library, and the SFC really helped make Adelphi Acre a model for neighborhood community building. I’m so thankful for the commitment of the steering committee and the community to this project. It is absolutely inspiring, and a sign of great things to come for our neighborhoods. I am proud to have had the opportunity to play a part in shaping this community.

TIMELINE

With that said, I am very excited to discuss our timeline for the next few months to get this garden in the ground! I have attached the timeline from the city that covers the remainder of our project build out.

?On Thursday we received word that the final license agreement was submitted and once that is approved we have full reign to get working! We have made arrangement to get the irrigators in to the garden first so that we could start building right behind them. All of the time frames for city action were listed as worst case scenario timelines. Some of these items could happen faster or marginally slower than listed.

WE NEED HEL?P GETTING THE SITE READY ?TO BUILD!

I’m sure a lot of you have noticed that we still have a great deal of mulch out at the site. Before any work can begin on the irrigation lines, we will need to clear that (spread the mulch), so that we can survey out the garden fence and irrigation lines.  We will be having a three to four small work days to get this taken care of.  Some will be done during the week, and maybe one on a weekend if necessary.  We will post our work days on the website, facebook, the garden mail list, and on the neighborhood e-mail lists. Please come out and help us out!

OTHER THINGS TO WATCH FOR!

• 4 picnic tables will be complete and added to the open Community Area under the oaks next month thanks to Paxton Tye’s Eagle Scout project!
•  Tool Shed and Compost area construction can start in September
• We will be partnering with Milwood Library again for two separate courses
  • The first workshop will be presented by Tree Folks and will cover tree pruning and care, as well as discuss some of the projects and opportunities to receive free trees, plantings in the park, as well and discuss volunteer tree planting opportunities to help beautify the community.
  • The second workshop will be presented by Austin Resource Recovery to offer the Home Composting Class and rebate on September 11th at 7PM. A few of us have gone in the past and it was very informative.
• Stay tuned for our 3rd quarterly meeting of the year. Date to be announced soon! More details regarding our build projects and orientations will be discussed.
• In the coming months I’ll take the time to put together a timeline that will outline all the work that went into this process and post it to the website for anyone who is interested.
• Posts with the new revised site layout. A few plots have moved locations due to a revised setback on the Adelphi side. The city wanted to leave 15’ of room to provide space for a possible future sidewalk.
• Detail of the revised 8’ fence. It used to be 6’?. We worked on this till the last week when we found out that a taller fence would not be a problem.?
• ??We’re getting excited and can’t wait to get started!

??