Yes, we’ve got that C.U.P.!

Well, Tuesday night was The Night.

At 7:00, Todd, Danny, and I were among the audience sitting in the City Council Chambers down at City Hall. The council was going to vote on whether or not we could be issued a conditional use permit with a variance on top.

As I’m sure you gathered from the title, the city council voted unanimously to allow us both documents.  So what’s next? Fundraising, that’s what, which I know you’ve noticed contains the word “fun”.  We have $1700 to raise and just about 2 months to do it. Watch out for an upcoming event you can attend to benefit our project in the near future. Until then, hold tight, and have faith in our ability to forge online documents.

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Last Thursday, the Day of Judgement

Last Thursday, Arlo, Todd, and I skipped out on the school’s last Presentation Night to go sit in on the Planning and Zoning Comittee’s meeting to discuss our conditional use permit and variance.  It was a stressful meeting; we recieved the agenda in advance and found that they were planning on denying our request for a variance (which would have forced us to put the greenhouse in a field used for phy ed, and with not much great sunlight).

Thanks to some great argument on Todd’s part (and my rather amazing attempt at stringing coherent thoughts together) we managed to get a unanimous vote to approve the conditional use AND the variance.  So next Tuesday, there’s a city council meeting where they’ll do the final vote. Keep your fingers crossed!

So what exactly IS going on here?

Over the past couple of days, we’ve been talking about what exactly we need to do yet before we can stick a greenhouse down on the property. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far.

1. Raise another $1700 for the greenhouse itself (which is, in technicality, a hoophouse since it uses no heat source other than the sun).
2. Get approved for the conditional use permit by the City of Northfield (unfortunately, this is completely out of our hands).
3. Purchase the hoophouse and arrange for installation
4. Prepare the soil where the greenhouse will go, since we’ll be planting some things in the ground. This process will include working compost from the school’s own bins into the dirt.
5. Do some trial planting over the summer so we can see how different growing under plastic is (more water? less water? more weeds? less bugs? You get the idea!).
6. Have a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate our efforts.

This was a clarifying talk to have for us, so I hope it’ll help you out too!

Early May Update

Things at ARTech are getting more and more hectic as the quarter draws to a close.  On May 20th, classes will close and we will switch to a May term. While not much new may be posted, rest assured that work will still be continuing!

Last Thursday, Todd and I took the conditional use permit down to City Hall with a check for $1550 and seven copies of the site plan, among other things. So now that very large step is finished. We should have approval by early June.

Fundraising is coming along smashingly! According to our calculations, we have between $1400 and $2400 left to raise, depending on which greenhouse will be purchased.  (Which of course also depends on how much money we raise).

Also, I’m working on getting a photo or six of the model greenhouse we made for Earth Day for either the blog header or a pretty-looking post. Keep checking back!

Applications: the Update

Today, Todd talked to Dan Olson, from the City of Northfield, about the conditional use permit. We now know exactly what we need to submit, and how to write it. The final amount of money we’ll need to write a check for is a whopping $1550 for a conditional use permit and a variance (which will allow us to put the greenhouse in further forward than the very back of the school).

This is a lot of money for anybody, but here’s something to consider: this fee is over half of what our hoophouse will cost us once we go to build it, and look at how sweet it is (image courtesy of Poly-Tex, Inc.):

We talk to our landlord’s representative early next week for a signature on the conditional use permit and variance. The school is willing to write us a check until we can invoice the University of Minnesota for our CERTs grant coverage. Everything is really starting to fall into place!