Dawn’s Lot

Some of you might have heard of Dawn’s Porch, the porch on the vacant house that my friend Dawn is rebuilding to house more persons with disabilities. Now Dawn, the D in DMZ, is offering the vacant lot she purchased from the city for the DMZ community Growing Power garden next year. With the support of neighbors, the school across the street Robert LaFollette K-5 and Growing Power, we hope to build a community garden using the principles of the home model of Growing power that this site, Diary of the Worm, has promoted for almost two years.

As soon as we finish setting up the new site www.nonviolentworm.org, we hope to have a special mini-website dedicated to this new DMZ garden. We are already preparing for it — yesterday and today Marna, Dawn and I have added waste to the compost pile and food to the worm depository, now located in one of Dawn’s four backyards.

Now the lot is empty, the city’s “No Dumping Sign” left on it. There are hundreds of these empty lots, mostly owned and maintained by the city of Milwaukee, in the neighborhood around Dawn’s lot. In fact in the same one block of this lot there are seven other empty lots. On the block next to Dawn’s they are tearing another house thus creating another vacant lot. The city plants grass on the lots, posts signs and maintains them. If this model GP garden community lot goes well, maybe the word will spread throughout the North Side neighborhood. Many persons cannot afford to purchase the lot next to them, but just maybe the city can ‘rent’ it to community people while the city waits and waits for houses to be built on these lots.

That is enough maybes for tonight. Maybes can become, with some hard work, realities. Making our own soil the ground on the empty lots does not matter. There is an abundant supply of youth and seniors to help in the GP community gardens. Community gardens, or “Victory Gardens” as they were called in World War II, are nothing new. What is different about these Growing Power community gardens is the amount of food, using worm power, which can be grown on a small lot. Dawn’s vacant lot can be another example of how to Grow Renewal Affordable Food (GRAF) in an urban environment.

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