News & Views of Phillips Since 1976
Monday December 29th 2025
Growing the Backyard adjacent to the Cultural Wellness Center
Get involved!
Do you have a garden related skill you would like to share with your neighbors? Want to host a SkillShare in your yard? Want to learn something new?
Topics may include (depending on interest):
- basics of urban farming
- aquaponics
- garden planning
- seed starting
- starting a garden
- garden maintenance
- growing food for personal use
- using sustainable growing methods
- harvesting
- markets and marketing
- food preparation
- food preservation
- seed saving
- food justice
- composting
- soil building
- season extension
- hoop houses
- developing value added products from the produce that is grown.
Have another topic in mind? Let us know. Contact Tim Page tpage4@gmail.com for more information and to get involved.
Related Images:
Growing the Backyard CHAT Returns to its Roots
Container Garden at 2020 Oakland Avenue
By Cherry Flowers and Tim Page
With renewed enthusiasm, and building on the successes of previous years, Growing the Backyard CHAT (Community Health Action Team) members are focusing energy on truly GROWING the backyards of residents in the “Backyard” neighborhoods! Growing the Backyard CHAT is part of the Backyard Initiative facilitated by the Cultural Wellness Center, and sponsored by Allina Health. This year, Growing the Backyard CHAT existing members-Collie Graddick, Candis McKelvy, and Tim Page-the Project Manager, welcome new active members: Cherry Flowers, Bunmi Odumuye, Abdullah Mohamud, and Dallas Johnson. The team is also looking for more neighbors who have knowledge to share.
Do YOU have a urban farming related skill to share with your neighbors? Volunteer to be a resident facilitator! Young adults involved in the TEENs CHAT will also facilitate SkillShare opportunities for interested residents including members of other CHATs. Participants will share knowledge and skills related to urban farming in order to empower neighbors to pursue related interests. We also plan to tap into the knowledge of Hennepin County Master Gardeners at events as much as possible.
Over the past 5 years, Growing the Backyard CHAT members have helped provide locally grown produce to area food pantries, provided free cooking classes to community members, sold produce at market stands at Midtown Global Market and the Wellness Center market, and worked on the Minneapolis HomeGrown Corner store Initiative to improve healthy food offerings at these stores.… Read the rest “Growing the Backyard CHAT Returns to its Roots”
Keep citizen journalism alive!
Frank Reflections: When is satire racist?
BY FRANK ERICKSON
If neo-Nazis in Paris were publishing racist caricatures of Muslims and then were murdered for doing it, would millions of French citizens hit the streets to show solidarity with the dead skinheads? I doubt it.
This is all about who is doing the racism. We know this because if neo-Nazis were doing exactly the same thing, they would not have the majority of the West supporting them.
It”'s easy for the West to defend this type of racism when it is coming from white intellectuals who are not being racist at all; they are being “satirical”, with nothing but their innocent little pens and paper. How easy and safe for the West to cloak this with intellectual babble about “satire” and freedom of speech, instead of calling it what it is. Do neo-Nazis belong to a “satirical” organization?
The violence starts with the drawing of a racist caricature. If I go out on the street and start calling Black people the n-word and get myself killed, am I a freedom of speech hero”¦I would be if I directed my attack upon the West”'s enemy.
Local editorial cartoonist Steve Sack, of the Star Tribune, draws brutal racist caricatures of people of Arab descent.… Read the rest “Frank Reflections: When is satire racist?”