Marlon (blog author, left) and Peter working to protect plants from the frost in early November

This fall has been coming along well so far for Let’s Go Chicago. During my 1st week back at LETS GO, I helped teach classes in the children’s garden, worked on the cooperative business development project, and got ready to attend Power Shift 2013 in Pittsburgh, PA.

In children’s garden, we assisted the children to pickle radishes and cucumbers.It was exciting to see how enthusiastic the children were to pickle vegetables. I was really surprised to see how many of the children wanted to pickle radishes.

In the following week, we attended Power Shift 2013, an environmental justice conference in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania from Saturday to Monday. At Power Shift solutionaries collaborated to address climate change,fracking,capitalism, and the oppression of people of color and Indigenous people. On the last day of Power Shift, there was a large action held to show resistance to the banks that invest in fracking for natural resources and to hold local politicians accountable for allowing capitalist to pollute the environment. I heard many stories from environmentalist and Indigenous people that live in communities that face the crisis of water and air pollution.

Molly Costello, Kara Hoy, and Nell Seggerson (from left to right) of LETS GO participate in the Power Shift march for a Green Economy

Once we returned to Chicago, two other members of the collective(Peter&Molly) and I did the garden maintenance on Steve’s yard, our backyard CSA garden. Due to the low temperatures approaching, we harvested some tomatoes, kale, chili peppers, and constructed a small greenhouse structure to save the remaining crops from frost. It was sort of a relief to know that we can preserve the plants without the risk of pulling them out premature.

Kale salad made from fall garden harvest

Over the past month, Peter, Ethan, and I collaborated on our objectives and the timeline for our cooperative business development project. This project is important to me because we can provide a service for a community that faces flooding issues in the community that we work,live,and socialize in. We are working on our timeline because we have to arrange our priorities to accomplish our goal of becoming an established coop by the up and coming growing season. If you haven’t seen it already, check out our new video and fundraising campaign for the cooperative project by clicking the image below:

Stay tuned for more updates as we move into the winter season and continue our planning for what we hope to be an exciting 2014!

-Marlon English