Macro Connect’s Community Garden

The plans for Macro Connect’s campus included a storage building with an open rooftop for entertaining, an outdoor fitness space, and a community garden to serve both Macro Connect employees and the surrounding community. 

The move-in date to Hosmer for the Macro Connect team was July of 2023. Fast forward to April of 2024, and plans were laid for leveling the ground in the back, across Pulford Street and next to the newly constructed Storage Building. 

Part 1

Heavy equipment such as bulldozers and excavators were needed to level this ground where an old brick home had clearly stood at some point. There was quite a bit of junk to remove - car parts, metal scraps, rocks, and bricks. The ground was hard, uneven, and filled with large weeds. After a few weeks, here was the space we had to work with: 

Before any rocks or mulch were laid and prior to the garden beds being established, we had our first task, building and setting up 6 wooden garden beds. We have some handy team members who like to measure and use tools, and some who also know a lot about gardening. 

We had a core group of 6 people regularly volunteering, and then many team members joined for smaller portions of the transformation you’re about to see. The volunteer time we used to build our Community Garden is an example of our donated time program that encourages our team members to find causes they care about and to volunteer their time to support them. 

Over the next week, we built, we dug, we learned new skills, and we planted:

When all six beds were built, we were ecstatic, and hurried to get our poor baby greens, donated by Keep Growing Detroit, into the dirt, because they had been waiting for their new home for a few weeks!

Part 2

Next up, it was time for our landscaping company to lay out sections for the larger Community Garden space. This included sectioning off areas that would serve as perennial beds, walking paths, open areas, and grassy areas.

It’s amazing what some well-laid mulch and rocks can do to beautify a space: 

Next up? A very memorable component of building this Community Garden, the selection, placement, and heavy labor involved in planting trees! We had help from our landscaper in building the perennial beds, along with guidance, sweat labor, and loving hands of Bridget Morin, mother of Co-Founders Matt & Kevin Morin. The perennials we ordered from Allemon’s Landscaping, and the trees came to us from the Greening of Detroit. 

Many volunteer hours of pickaxing in rock-hard, unforgiving dirt, still pulling up metal car parts and broken bricks, and we were able to get into the ground somewhere between 10 and 15 new trees. Here’s a look: 

Part 3

Let’s take a look at how the Community Garden has worked one year later:

We have a fairly regular community helper, a man named Gil, who lives in the house behind our Community Garden. He keeps us company, throws away many of our weeds, and inquires about nearly everything we plant. 

During our first events hosted outside in 2024 - Macro Fest in June and our End-of-Summer BBQ in September, we had young neighborhood kids join our team for the outdoor games. Then, when we were harvesting and had vegetables that we could not fully consume, some of our neighbors came by and took some off our hands. 

This is what we were hoping would happen - that the community would become interested, and would engage with us, and hopefully join us in rebuilding Detroit one neighborhood at a time. 

As we get ready to host our next event outdoors, Macro Fest 2025, here is what our Community Garden looks like one year later: