Fall Creek Gardens teaches sustainable practices for growing food in the city. We seek funding for a sunflower mural that will engage the neighborhood and beautify our community garden!
Leader
Maggie Goeglein
Location
3005 N Central Avenue Indianapolis, IN 46205
Impact areas
Fall Creek Gardens: Urban Growers Resource Center in Indianapolis, Indiana, seeks to teach sustainable practices for growing food in an urban area. Currently, Fall Creek Gardens has a native-species orchard, community garden, storage shed, covered patio, and cistern with rainwater catchment system.
One of our priorities is to paint a mural for the gardens. We have already repaired the existing wall in preparation for the mural, thanks to generous donations of materials and labor from local contractors, Universal Roofing and Exteriors and Reese Wholesale. We polled our contacts and gardeners to determine their favorite mural design and the winner is a scene filled with huge sunflowers in front of a blue sky and green field. Since our site is a brownfield, the design speaks to the practice of growing sunflowers in contaminated land in order to remediate it and make it healthy once again. Our next step is to secure the funding needed for the painting to begin!
As the backdrop for our community garden and the patio where gardeners gather for pitch-in lunches and rest in the shade, this mural will create a vibrant visual context for the community's interaction around growing fresh, healthy, delicious food. The actual creation of the mural will be a neighborhood effort, with opportunities for youth and student painting. The 1092 sq. ft. mural will also be a way for Fall Creek Gardens to "give back" to the Indianapolis art scene and add to the Indianapolis cultural community.
We are ready to begin work on the mural as soon as we are able to purchase the necessary supplies.
Our artist has developed a timeline for completing the mural in 4-5 weeks, and we have a volunteer who will coordinate youth volunteers from the neighborhood to help paint.
The artist will first apply the outline or cartoon of the mural and will handle any painting that requires scaffolding, lifts, or ladders. When the outline is in place, we will host 1-2 Saturday or after-school volunteer painting events, so that children in the community can also contribute to the mural.
After the mural is complete, an anti-graffiti and UV-protective coating will be applied to seal and preserve the mural.
Fall Creek Gardens is located in the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood of Indianapolis, a community with limited access to mainstream grocers and fresh foods. The neighborhood has many empty homes and vacant lots, some of which have significant contamination from former industrial use and lead exposure. The community garden is located on land that the city has designated as a brownfield, which means that the land must be capped with mulch and any gardening done in raised beds. By turning these formerly vacant lots into organic gardens, we will not only create a beautiful space, a place for neighbors to meet, interact, learn, and grow fresh produce, but we will also to build healthy soil and improve the health of the land itself.
With the addition of our mural, the area around our garden will continue to transform—from an empty, weedy lot in front of a crumbling wall to a lush, green garden flanked by a beautiful piece of public art.
