Back to Eden Community Garden

We have art workshops, music nights and a little bit of drama. We share information relevant to the gardening experience through educational field trips.

Gardening, the Arts, and Careful Observation

Back To Eden's Celebrate Urban Birds event will be a full day of "bird-centric" activities. One of the projects will involve attracting birds to the area by planting bushes and sunflowersand hanging birdhouses and feeders. Also, the community garden plans to have a fun educational workshop where participants share their bird stories and observations as well as questions they have. One of the main goals will be to encourage an ongoing interest in birds of the area and implement the scientific observational work that Celebrating Urban Birds uses. Hopefully, many in the neighborhood take pride in their ability to contribute to scientific research.

To integrate our project with the arts, the garden would like to create four bird focused activities. The first would be to develop an art installation on an empty iron gate that might integrate flight and other bird behaviors. The second would be the creation of two simple bird baths poured from cement and tiled with glass globs as mosaic art. Third, designing a Celebrate Urban Birds flag for our flagpole, sharing space with the American flag. Finally, we plan to compile a fun video for YouTube and other venues in order to share our project.

The Celebration

 Mrs.Sabriyah Abdul-Qaadir, Co. President of Back to Eden Community Garden, wrote us back to tell us how things went:

"We at Back to Eden Community Garden, had a great day [celebrating urban birds]".

We started our day by cleaning our community garden so the neighbors could have a safe and clean space to enjoy.
 
We read stories about our friends the birds and made bird feeder houses for the birds to enjoy. We also had a recycling sculpture project and other programmed activities.

We even made a song about the birds and the sweet sounds that they make. The song's title was "sweet bird sounds" and the children sang it with great style and they had lots of fun.
 
We also gave out Celebrate Urban Birds kits to our youth to share with their friends and families.
 
This was just the beginning of a summer kick off.  We plan to have  family summer session every Thursday night and present to the community the opportunity to particapate and celebrate urban birds."