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Hi Neighbors! We wanted to take a moment and give you an update on Burwell Gardens. In April 2018, we purchased 131 E Burwell Ave at auction from the City. After several years of listening to our neighbors, we began dreaming of a community green space in Oakwood-Lincoln Park that would help grow food and relationships. In the last eight years, an overgrown abandoned city lot transformed into a space for picnic tables, a fire pit, a sand box, a free-produce community fridge, a custom greenhouse/shed, three compost bins, 20 raised beds, and a 30X30 foot in-ground “Common Good” bed. We’ve hosted student groups, field trips, UT Athletics staff, yoga, baby showers, Girl Scout projects, and some excellent local musicians. In 2021, when “community” was hard to come by, the garden received a Keep Knoxville Beautiful “Community Space” Orchid Award. A couple hundred people have made their way through the garden over the past few years to work, grow food and flowers, meet neighbors, or simply to turn off the news and sit in the midst of a reminder that new things are always growing. Gardeners are especially aware of the ways the natural world moves through seasons. The land needs to rest, and so do we. The garden is run entirely by volunteers, which takes a lot of organization and communication that we realize we haven’t had the capacity to do well lately. We realized the majority of the time we were spending in the garden was managing issues surrounding the misuse and abuse of the space. Eventually, after many attempts to communicate the gardens’ intended use and expectations, we had to lock the gates so that it was only available to those working in the garden, not the larger community, which was never our intention when we started. There is so much potential in what we’ve built alongside you all at Burwell Gardens, and yet the garden has become an endless list of things we should/need to do, but don’t actually want to do. Basically, a little over a year ago, Ben and I began noticing clear signs of burnout when it came to how we interacted with the garden. Alongside our board of directors and the support of Knox County’s Community Gardens & Growers Alliance, we began thinking of solutions that would give us a “sabbatical year” from managing the garden. We considered options like planting a cover crop and just shutting down the garden for a year, but then we met Cecilia Albert-Black. Cecilia grew up in Spain and moved to Southern Illinois at the age of ten. She studied Geology as an undergraduate and worked on market garden vegetable farms in Illinois for a year. She then interned at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania and apprenticed at Frith Farm in Maine, where she became fascinated by soil science and sustainable agriculture. She completed a Masters in Environmental & Soil Science from the University of Tennessee in which she conducted a study at Caney Fork Farms on the benefits of agroforestry and compost amendments to soil health. Now she’s a Data Science Engineering doctoral student at UTK studying stream water quality affected by urban development. Her passion for growing food has not ceased, which is what motivated her to become involved in local urban food production. She loves being outside in nature, understanding crops needs, learning about new crop varieties, saving seeds, and fostering healthy soil. In her free time you can find Cecilia bicycling her way around Knoxville, climbing at the Obed, or trail running in the city’s urban wilderness. Over the next few months, we will onramp Cecilia and familiarize her with the garden and you all. Cecilia is going to help fill in the gaps where our burnout has taken over. We hope this transition means much-needed TLC with the garden’s community organizing and planting schedule. With this, we are looking for 5-10 people who, over the next year, are willing to be part of the Garden Operations Team, to work alongside Cecilia and be her primary contacts for the next year. We expect to continue raised-bed rentals as normal next Spring, you are welcome and invited to have both a raised bed and be part of the Garden Operations Team. Cecilia's email address is CC'd in this email if you would like to contact her directly. It is likely you will notice some changes at the garden over the next year. There may not be as many social media posts, etc., but we will continue to work together as neighbors to cultivate and nurture Burwell Gardens as sustainably as possible, to continue growing food and neighborly relationships in OLP, and to maintain the space as a community asset where everyone respects its intended uses. Thank you for all of your contributions and support through the years. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have thoughts or questions. We hope you'll join us for a potluck dinner and more discussion about this on Wednesday! Shalom. -Ben & Molly Important upcoming dates: -THIS WEDNESDAY, September 24 6-8pm: Garden potluck, meet Cecilia, ask questions about this upcoming transition -Saturday & Sunday, November 1-2: Work days @ the garden to prep for winter (fb)