Reading Garden!!!

 Last year I won a small grant to put together a reading garden for Finn's school.  A student designed a  mural for us which we completed last year, but it took a little longer to get through the LAUSD red tape to complete the garden.  Patrick oversaw almost all of the construction work and the other parents who are in Friends of Glenfeliz with us were also really, really helpful.

 We finally found an amazing nonprofit organization called EnrichLA.  They have been putting kitchen gardens into numerous schools in the LA school district.  It is truly inspiring to see what they have achieved.  After having to scrap our first plan for the garden, they came up with a totally different but very cool design that completely fit within our budget.  On our planting day, we had over 125 volunteers, including parents, teachers, students, staff, people from the community, as well as a dedicated group of volunteers from EnrichLA and USC,

 Here is the entrance to the garden.  The plants don't look like much yet, but eventually they will fill out and the vines will grow up over the arbor.

Our City Councilman Eric Garcetti (and probably future Mayor of LA, Go Eric!) came out on his birthday to lend a hand and offer his support. I had originally written this grant hoping to be able to surprise my aunt Teresa with it - she was both an avid gardener and a reader. She died right before I found out we had been awarded the grant, but I was able to talk about it with my brother Michael quite a bit before he died, so completing this project means a lot to me. No one else will ever think about it this way, but Teresa and Michael were both a big part of why I put so much work into this project. I hope the kids get a kick out of it.

Here is the park part of the garden.  This was pretty much a scrubby piece of grass with some pretty trees on it before.  It has lots of plants on the other end now, a picnic bench and some nice stools made out of the stump of a beloved tree that fell down on campus during our bad windstorms this fall.

Now on to planning our kitchen garden...