Plant Chicago, with the help of the Parks District, the Peace and Education Coalition of Back of the Yards (BOTY) and the Plant Chicago Auxiliary Board, hosted an awesome Earth Day event this past weekend at Davis Square Park.
The weather was perfect for our community clean-up and tree mulching at Davis Square. BOTY community members, Plant Chicago Auxiliary Board, DePaul University volunteers and Parks District staff all worked together to get the mulching and clean-up done in just a couple of hours.
In line with the reuse mantra of Plant Chicago, we collected trash throughout the park and created beautiful arts and crafts! Among the crafts were self-watering planters made out of 2 liter botltes and magnets made out of trash. Other activities included an interactive decomposition challenge, where participants were asked to arrange the trash in order of slowest to fastest decomposition rates in a landfill and Earth Ball Volleyball.
All and all the day was a great success. We were able to celebrate Earth Day with our community and promote both our Mini Mobile Farmers Market at Davis Square and our Farmers Market at The Plant by handing out free $5 coupons to the neighborhood.
Ultimately, the goal is to provide fresh, local produce to the Back of the Yards community through our farmers market and to promote Plant Chicago’s free educational programming for BOTY residents.
If you live in the neighborhood, it’s free to come on a tour of The Plant! We offer Public Tours every Saturday at 2 pm, with additional tours on our Farmers Market days (every 1st Saturday of the month or starting June 4th – Sept 10 every Saturday) at 11:30 am and 2 pm.
Please contact Kassie Hinrichsen our Education and Outreach Manager at kassandra@plantchicago.org to coordinate a tour for a Back of the Yards school group or if you need Spanish support for our tour.
Thanks to everyone who came out to our Earth Day event – the Earth appreciated the help! To see more photos from the day check out our Facebook page.
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