Osage Street

Together with Arts Street youth artists, we designed, planted, and installed an urban garden on the Osage St. block of downtown Denver where the Arts Street offices are located. The completed community garden is outside of a Denver Housing Authority residential building, and it provides free produce to neighborhood residents. Public artwork is also integrated into the garden, and includes a color wheel paint design, a central wind chime sculpture, and laser cut wood signage identifying the plants in the garden. The garden provides both beauty and accessible, healthy produce to this urban neighborhood, and is designed to be easily maintained with a minimum amount of resources each year.

Throughout the program, the youth artists also learned about permaculture, ecosystems and urban farming. They learned gardening skills to apply to their own homes, and they created some take-home gardening projects. They also took field trips to three different urban gardening centers to see permaculture principles in action. The youth artists each created a final presentation on a particular permaculture topic that they shared with the whole group. These final resources have been gathered, and the group is in the process of uploading them all to an open-source platform so they are accessible to all.

We hope this program provides years of beauty and enjoyment to neighborhood residents, and also empowers students to take principles of permaculture and public art creation and apply them to their own homes and neighborhoods.