About Us

KWOG Volunteers

We are part of an inner city neighborhood that is about 1/3 mile from the headwaters of the Kankakee river which was created 16,000 years ago. Thus our soil developed over this period of time and is a type of glaciated, wetland soil, black, rich yet sandy (muck).

The beginning for us was exploring, research and planning with help from city departments, friends and neighbors in 2008. In 2009, a ragtag group of neighbors and friends joined founder Judith Rubleske on a vacant city lot after securing a temporary permit to grow a neighborhood garden growing a big crop of butternut squash. In September 2009 our gardening team was invited to garden on Olive and Poland properties by sheet mulching in preparation for planting vegetable crops in 2010. Everyone, child or adult, is a volunteer or a regular volunteer member and we do thirds of our harvest as we like…to eat what we grow, to donate what we harvest and to sell what we harvest to pay for garden expenses.

KWOG evolved with a 2011 launching grant from NRC and into an IRS 501 (c) (3) not for profit (based on charity as well as soil health and organic growing education) with the help of N.D.’S Community Legal Aid and vacant property ownership of 5 of the 6 gardens. Most recently, in 2017 La Casa De Amistad and KWOG advanced from being simply good neighbors helping each other into an organized partnership to help serve our community even with more community service hours being shared with KWOG and the United Way Grant for some funding for the food pantry and for KWOG by helping us afford tools to increase efficiency.

KWOG volunteers

In cold months La Casa hosts KWOG’s monthly bean shucking/soil and ecological growing education events which is found to be educative and fun. We include a soil or gardening KWOG group read discussion at some of the bean shucking gatherings.

We do our best in following four basic soil health principles (1. minimize soil disturbance, 2. maximize soil cover, 3. living roots, 4. maximize diversity) which guides our soil regeneration efforts. The main crop on each lot is a winter storable vegetable as our small city lots are too small for growing enough of winter squash, dried beans, potatoes, root crops, etc. in our backyard gardens. Some gardening includes no-tilling, broadforking for aeration, cover cropping, shredded leaf and chipped wood mulching, rain harvesting, watering by hand, keeping roots in the ground vs. pulling out harvested plants, composting, seed saving/exchanging, inoculating with mycorrhiza and aerated compost tea.