Garden
usiasts at
Temple
Emanu-El
find a
new row
to hoe.
Clockwise from top:
Bea Sacks of
Huntington Woods
has plans for the sunflowers.
A tomato plant gets the
attention of Helen Friedman
of Southfield.
Milt Levine of Oak Park
tends a garden bed.
DIANA LIEBERMAN
Special to the Jewish News
ust when most synagogue
activities are winding down
for the summer, the Temple
Emanu-El Garden Chavura is
going full speed ahead.
The chavura is a group of 20 or so
gardening enthusiasts and eager learn-
ers who have banded together to plant
the first-ever vegetable garden on the
temple's ample front lawn (where
Emanu-El's planners originally
thought 1-696 would come through).
The gardeners' goals are organic veg-
etables to donate to charity, pumpkins
and gourds for the temple sukka and,
eventually, tomato sauce for a big
spaghetti dinner at temple.
"It's been a dream of mine for years
and years," said organizer Bea Sacks, a
former Emanu-El president. "All this
grass — why don't we do something
with it?"
The gardening project. "fell on deaf
ears," she said, until Rabbi Joseph and
Barbara Klein came to Emanu-El.
When Barbara Klein heard the idea,
"then things really started happening,"
said Sacks.
The Kleins laid out the garden site
IT
Diana Lieberman is a freelance writer
in Bloomfield Hills.
last fall, picking a spot just east of the
Anne Jospey Sanctuary, where there's
plenty of sun but also wind protection
from a row of trees.
Funding for the project
comes from the Lee Wolin
Memorial Aitzim Chayim
Fund. Founded by Wolin's
family in 1990, the fund —
whose name means "trees of
life" in Hebrew — has planted more
than 50 trees on the temple grounds,
including those near the new garden.
The fund has also contributed annual
and perennial flower beds and gourds.
This is the first try at producing an
edible crop: tomatoes, zucchini,
cucumbers, beans, pumpkins and pep-
pers.
Start-up costs — soil, fence posts,
soaker hoses, seedlings — came to less
than $500. The initial manual labor
was free to the group, most of it sup-
plied by Rabbi Klein.
In April, the religious school got
involved. Students in grades K-3
planted marigold seeds as their contri-
bution, taking their pots home for
nurturing until the last day of class.
"It's a real family activity," said
Barbara Klein. "Every time I've been
here gardening, a mother who's pick-
ing up her children will come over to
see what's going on. Our families who
y
are working on the garden also have
children.
Responsibility for weeding, water-
ing and cultivating the all-organic gar-
den was decided at the chavura's orga-
nizational meeting on June 2.
Everybody has a row to hoe, except
for the volunteer secretary.
Although they'll
meet as a group
each Wednesday, <
the gardeners plan
to show up at
other times to
water the plot,
spray with organic
compounds and do
a little touch-up
weeding.
Once the crop is
ripe, the chavura
hopes to donate
vegetables to resi-
dents of the Prentis
and Teitel Jewish
Apartments next door, as well as to
Yad Ezra, the kosher food bank, all
in Oak Park.
Emergency loaves of Milt
Levine's wife's zucchini bread may
be necessary if the zucchini really
takes off.
And the biggest pumpkin
grown will be raffled off at the
congregation's spaghetti dinner,
tentatively set for Oct. 20.