draw our neighborhood

Draw mental maps of the neighborhood as we know it. Our homes, landmarks (parks, businesses, etc), major roads, as well as sites where we are working to improve the environment (gardens, tree beds, etc) and sites where we have environmental concerns (brownfields, active industry and infrastructure). Sometimes this exercise is part of community asset mapping.

Regroup in front of mapknitter and create an online EJ map. Save for future addition of our own aerial photos.

goal setting

The garden leadership group chooses which of our goals we want to measure progress towards.

choosing how to track our progress

The garden leadership group chooses how to do the measuring, then designs the measuring methodology as an activity (or activities) that many people in the garden can participate in. Based on existing protocols in Five Borough Farm (http://publiclab.org/wiki/5bf).

first measuring day

Add in measuring activities to your normal routine in the garden. Depending on which goals you are aiming to track, this could be:

• weighing all of the day's harvest.
• marking bucketfuls of incoming organic waste that you are diverting from the landfill.
• assigning task cards to gardeners, then collecting them at the end of the day to add up how many hours were dedicated to the garden.
• photographing garden beds in infrared to track growth

field day 1: pole aerial mapping

Schedule this event for a critical time in the garden, perhaps at the height of the growing season. Stitch the imagery together in the same mapknitter doc where we made our EJ map.

"bed by bed" infrared

If you are testing different cultivation regimes on a crop, set a "photo stand" where you can put your infrared camera and take pictures from the same place through time.

last field day

• after the garden is put away for the winter, make another aerial photo map for use over the winter planning next season.