Mark your Calendars: Monday May 9th --- SCA Plant Exchange and General Meeting

The SCA Plant Exchange and Bi-Annual General Meeting is Monday, May 9th!!!

This year we are hosting our first of many plant exchanges and presenting some fantastic designs for the remodel of Sabin Triangle (SW corner of 15th and Prescott). All of the events listed below take place at Sabin School on Monday, May 9th.

Childcare will be provided.

6-7pm--- We will host Sabin’s free neighborhood plant exchange where neighbors/friends who love gardening get together and swap seedlings, cuttings, bulbs, potted plants, bagged plants, or other terms for easily planted flora. Please make sure all items are properly labeled (to the best of your knowledge), and potted/bagged (to the best of your ability- see Neighborhood Beets article in May edition of our printed newsletter). Our local Ariadne Garden will have a few starts for sale

as well. Tables will be setup outside on the basketball courts at Sabin Elementary (SE entrance).

7-8pm---The SCA will be presenting some concepts for how to repurpose the Sabin Triangle. Architects will be on hand to present their designs and Sabin will be asking for your input so please join us! The presentation will take place in the Sabin School auditorium and Whole Foods will provide delicious refreshments.

8-9pm--- If you want to help make your neighborhood a better place for everyone, this is your chance. We will be hosting elections to the Sabin Community Association board. Board members for July 1, 2011-June 30, 2012. The SCA and this community need your help!

If you’re interested in serving on the SCA Board for 2011-2012, please contact Austin Peterson, President, 503-519-6447 or sabinpresident@gmail.com, or Barbara Conable, Secretary, 503-283-9636 or barbconable@hevanet.com.

Your Sabin Front Yard

In his remarkably rich first book, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Michael Pollan offers the image that the plurality of grass lawns planted by the tens of millions across America in the last century congealed into the singular and became one vast lawn stretching coast to coast, with the concrete hardscape of our highways the heavily travelled paths in the awful sameness of it all. Well, that was then, and this is now: look around the Sabin community of beautiful Portland, Oregon, and you will see a wonderful variety emerging out of that sameness, with some front yards full of flowering plants and others sporting vegetables, tall grasses, herbs, impressive stones, sculpture, street trees, and native shrubs. In Sabin, you see people using mulch to control weeds and save water. You see gardens attracting bees and butterflies. Some front gardens are fenced for pets and children while others have the open character of Oregon beaches. Some are blank slates. Some bespeak neglect, in other words: opportunity, adventure.

This essay is written for those Sabin homeowners who don’t yet know what they want to do with their front yards. Whereas in the dismal past folks just planted grass and mowed it, now your options seem limitless and bewildering. How do you figure out what to do?