Some East Bay residents showed off their green thumbs as they turned a vacant corner into a community garden.<\/p>\n
The garden is located at the corner of 54th Street and Shattuck Avenue under Highway 24 in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood.<\/p>\n
It used to be a dirt lot that was used for illegal dumping and parking, until neighbors decided they needed to do something about it.<\/p>\n
Nonprofit Sidewalk Trees and Gardens took care of permitting and logistics while Vincent Kitirattragarn, who lives near the site, took charge of fundraising to pay for landscaping, soil and seedlings. The fundraising effort raised more than $23,000.<\/p>\n
Dozens of volunteers spent hours cleaning up the space, laying down soil, and planting trees and flowers.<\/p>\n
“They’re all native pollinators, so it’s considered a pollinator garden,” Kitirattragarn said. “We are not allowed to plant edible plants because it’s very close to a highway, so we chose all native pollinator plants. They are drought resistant. We did install some irrigation, but the plants that we have there are drought resistant as well.”<\/p>\n
A grand opening for the garden will be held Saturday afternoon.<\/p>\n
“I’m really happy that it happened on our block, and I want to see it happen on more blocks throughout Oakland,” Kitirattragarn said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some East Bay residents showed off their green thumbs as they turned a vacant corner into a community…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-284919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}