Wide approval and moving on

The local government has studied our plans, notably the person in charge of public green space. We got a positive reply from this person, who asked to be kept up to date. We were sent to the default place for getting our project subsidised but he clearly wanted to stay tuned.

To build up a case for the project's subsidy, we have walked around our neighbourhood to collect signatures from the people in our street. The success was incredible: everyone signed and we had a load of positive feedback!

We organised the signing in two stages; we went by the doors for signatures while mentioning that everyone was invited in one of our homes for a demo; we had a 3D gardening program that we could use to "walk" through the design, while informing them about the ideas we had. Most of the neighbours chose to sign on the doorstep, some came to actually see what we had in mind with the place.

An interesting side-effect of our door-by-door walk was that neighbours took the chance to request other things they would appreciate being done in the neighbourhood. Of course we could not help with most, but there is certainly interest in more cooperative work in the street. That's always good to learn.

We are also collecting a fair list of people willing to help out with the setup of the new-style garden. Of course we plan to include the local kids as well; as long as they treat it as play, they'll have fun doing some gardening work, and that is hardly likely to make them less valuable citizens.

Today, we went by a local plant grower who will send us a quote. Based on the quote, a fairly complete list of neighbour signatures and our requests we shall stand a fair chance of collecting the funds for building this wonderful project in our own Haarlebrink!

To the list of articles about the permaculture for the Haarlebrink.