Somerville Urban Ag | Guest blogger: Cortney Kirk, Somerville Urban Ag…

Guest blogger: Cortney Kirk, Somerville Urban Ag Ambassador

During the spring and summer of 2018 I spent my volunteer time, as a
Somerville Urban Agriculture Ambassador, at the Somerville Growing
Center.  It has been a great experience and fulfilled one of my goals of
participating in the Ag program, getting more involved with a community
of people who appreciate urban green space.

As a completely volunteer run non-profit, the Somerville Growing
Center had plenty of opportunities to get involved and help out with
very established programs and volunteer events, as well as being a place
one can bring their own programming, lesson, event, pretty much what
ever you want to the center.  As a practicing landscape architect, I
felt very comfortable getting involved with contributing where ever I
could with the upcoming Growing Center’s renovation project.

One piece of any construction project, is understanding what a
designer has envisioned and put into drawing form.  This can often be a
challenge for anyone who is not involved in design or construction.  
With my abilities to read construction drawings, I assisted the Growing
Center with understanding what exactly was going on with the demolition
drawings, especially the tree protection and removal plan.  I was able
to tag existing trees in the center with different colors of tape so
that anyone could walk around the Growing Center and understand what
trees will be saved and what trees will be removed as part of the
renovation project.  This helped the Growing Center to run their
neighborhood meeting about tree removals, as well as mark up drawings so
people could better understand the trees on a map.

Demolition can be a crazy, labor intensive job, and another area I
spent time on was leading a small team of Tufts students to demolish one
of the garden sheds.  The Tufts students were fantastic to work with
and were volunteering as part of their freshman orientation.  It was
great to see students, most who were new to the Boston area, jump right
in, not afraid of getting dirty, and get some larger demolition jobs
complete for the Growing Center.

It has been wonderful getting introduced to the community at the
Growing Center.  I still have one project in the works – to bring to
fruition a material design competition for the re-installation of the
Growing Center’s labyrinth.  I’ll keep you posted as future developments
get set in motion.