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Health & Fitness

A Garden is a Portal

Gardening cultivates community within Lemont children.

"More than anything else, a garden is a portal,

a passage into another world, one of your own thoughts and your own making;

it is whatever you want it to be and you are what you want to be."

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- William Longgood

As fellow neighbors spend this time outdoors, battling the rush of spent leaves from their lawn, gardeners endear the autumnal season for planting bulbs and tending the soil. 

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As soon as I recieve a delivery of bulbs, I make time to get them in the ground. At home, I planted small allium drumsticks within my front knot gardens.

At the Children's Garden at the , the last planting for this growing season was a patch of garlic. As we waited for our bulbs to arrive, we composted and added well-rotted manure to the garlic bed.

We did our research amending the soil, hoping for a successful harvest next summer. Our final chores of the garden at the library will be cleaning up the planting beds and layer composting them. 

Through the season we composted our yard waste, coffee grounds, paper plates and will add the fallen leaves. This will be our second autumnal season applying layers of compost to enrich our soil for the next growing year. We had an excellent crop return in our variety of plantings, but that was not our ultimate goal. At our community garden we cultivated relationships, interested in taking care of a piece of the Earth.

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