Detroit - Urban Issues

Although we have a "very high standard of hygiene", we got down and dirty with The Greening of Detroit.  Half of us started off by learning the recipe for soil and then mixing it to fill seed-trays.   Once the trays were filled, we began seeding them with various vegetable and flower seeds.  The rest of the group was in the other half of the greenhouse removing stray Arugula leaves from the plant beds.  Once the seeding was completed we learned how to transplant Black Seeded Simpson lettuce into separate trays while others made planting labels.  We even ate flowers, fresh spinach and Arugula leaves.  It was easy to forget that we were in the middle of downtown Detroit as we worked away in a peaceful greenhouse. One side of the greenhouse was considerably warmer than the other and it actually began to feel like a "spring" break, regardless of the 30-degree temperature outside. We met several hipster workers, who had an interesting array of life stories, including one from a worker who grows medical marijuana for local patients in Michigan. The other workers came from various locales around the United States and were well-versed in the history of Detroit's food desert. A food desert is any urban center in an industrialized country where access to healthy and affordable food is scarce. We see this daily with the abundance of fast-food restaurants and lack of fresh markets and supermarkets in our local surroundings here. We finished off the day by plowing and gathering up stray leaves as a group.  When we returned to our temporary home at University of Detroit Mercy, the boys made a delicious dinner of nachos.   It was Carol's first time eating nachos, yay! We quickly ate and ran to Detroit Mercy's library to see the Race & Housing exhibit, in which Greening of Detroit was mentioned!  The exhibit focused on the many events that have shaped the current socioeconomic state of Detroit.  We anxiously await the exciting conclusion of our 2-day Greening of Detroit adventure!