Walking for safety.

Chris Carter, by far the most enthusiastic member of our Neighborhood Watch, just sent out some walking routes, one of which is posted below. The folks who've been getting together each month mostly live in the same section of Riverside and the routes he drew up are to help us keep an eye on things.

If you're interested in joining this group, or one of the others that's formed in the Riverside and Avondale areas, please let me know.


Chris says:

Each route is approximately 1.8 miles, which I set with the idea of using the route as an exercise walk. I have always read that a good walk should be at least two miles. Now, you will notice that the route covers the RADO building, as well as the homes of our active watch group members.

Neighborhood Watch meeting, tonight at 6:30pm.

When clowns with AK-47s hold up your peaceful European Bistro in the dead of night...when ninjas and zombies break into your house to steal your PlayStation...when New Years Eve revellers shoot your friend in the foot...and shoot straight through the hardiboard of your brand new homeowner's bungalow...

Man, it's really hard to make crime funny. I'm gonna stop trying.

At the first meeting of the Neighborhood Watch group we had upwards of a dozen people. This time we'll be distributing contact lists and maps of the members, updating each other on a few key issues we mentioned last time, and planning our first neighborhood cleanup and cookout.

I'd like to talk about scheduling some regular neighborhood walkthroughs as well.

Our focus area is the corner of the district from College and Stockton north and west, but if you're elsewhere and want to get involved please come. We know a few other groups that cover other areas and could connect you with them.

Otherwise, if you'd just like to keep up to date with what we're doing, keep checking this blog, or ask to be added to our email group.

See you at 6:30pm, at our office, 881 Stockton Street. The meeting should only take an hour. I try to start and end on time.

Native plants, doing just fine at Green Street.

I went in to check on the plants today, and separate out some of the grasses into individual pots. They all seem to be doing well. All the varieties we salvaged have rather tough leaves, and they haven't shown any sign of damage or stress. I'm impressed.

I'm posting images of the plants so that Pete can tell us what exactly we got, and maybe Jake can give me some ideas about how to care for them. My instinct is to nurture, but I'm thinking they probably don't want too much water. We pulled them out of almost pure sand, mixed with clay and a LOT of pine humus (ancient bark and needles).

Native Plant Rescue, trial run.

Native grasses, rescued from Kernan Boulevard.


Yesterday Matt and I drove out to the future site of Beazer Homes' mega-development on Kernan Boulevard to rescue native plants. With the help of Pete Johnson and the rest of the Ixia Chapter of the Native Plant Society, we're going to be providing our future homebuyers with beautifully landscaped lawns that require almost no water. We salvaged some grasses, and some small and medium-sized shrubs, which we're going to care for at the Green Street site until we're ready to install them at 703 Ralph.

The Beazer site is about 300 acres total, of which we've yet to explore much more than a couple dozen. It's VAST. It's heartbreaking. It's full of lovely plants that will soon be under pavement, condos and strip malls.

There are far more plants on this site alone than we can foresee using in the next year or so, and there are plenty other developments in the works. I'm hoping to be able to arrange agreements with other nonprofit groups in the city to rescue plants like this for the sake of promoting water conservation and neighborhood revitalization simultaneously.

This project just makes so much sense.

Please get in touch if you're interested in helping us with future rescues. There are 300 acres worth of valuable plants here, and they're going to be destroyed if someone doesn't give them a home.

It'd be great if Beazer would pay me to rescue the plants for use in THEIR future landscaping. The wastefulness of the situation destroys me. They will clearcut hundreds of gorgeous acres of Floridian plant life, then ship trees from some nursery to put in little concrete boxes here and there. Surely it would be more cost effective to have a kid rescue trees and shrubs from the site before they destroy them all, and just replant them once the construction is finished.