There are numerous benefits to starting a community garden. Community gardens can provide access to fresh food in areas that have no other options. As the name implies, gardening can bring communities together, and can even raise property values in a neighborhood. As populations have grown increasingly concentrated around urban centers, opportunities to interact with nature, as well as access to the food it provides, have been diminished.
According to the CDC, only one in ten Americans consumes enough fruit and vegetables each day. In many areas, fast food and pre-packaged foods are the only options available. This is a contributing factor to the rise of health conditions, like diabetes, and the increasing cost of healthcare in the United States.
Vacant proprieties can be detrimental to home values and even increase the rate of crime. Repurposing vacant property as a community garden, can help to reverse those trends. If you’re interested in case studies about how even small changes to neighborhood surroundings can have a positive impact on a community, check out the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
Community gardening is not the answer to all of these problems, but it can be a start. It empowers communities to help themselves, and think locally, which helps our planet as well. A model example of transformative community gardening is Bonton Farms, in south Dallas, TX. If you are in the area, volunteering there is a rewarding way to spend a Saturday morning, and you can apply what you learn there to projects in your own community.
What is Community Gardening?
A community garden is a central food garden run by an entire community for the benefit of that community.
A group of like-minded people get together to turn a vacant lot into an outdoor superstore of fresh produce and flowers. They all chip in for seeds, equipment, and other supplies and share the fruits of their labor come harvest time.
Where do they find the land to do this? Take a closer look at your neighborhood. Even in major cities, about 21% of the available land lies vacant and unused.
Often, these patches are an eyesore, overflowing with litter and building rubble. With a little work, they’re the ideal centralized venue for a community garden which can bring big benefits to any neighborhood.
Benefits of Community Gardening
Now, chances are that somebody somewhere owns this land. Why not get a band of like-minded citizens together and approach the owner with a proposal?
If they have no immediate use for their property, it’s easy to convince them that a community garden is a great idea with huge benefits for everyone involved. These are:
Improving Your Surroundings
Overgrown crowded lots are an eyesore that can affect property values and degrade community spirit. When you uplift areas in an urban setting, you instantly create a better atmosphere for everyone who lives there.
Gardening also has little impact on the land apart from improving the quality of the soil. Bees, butterflies, and birds flock to green spaces.
Cleaning Up the Environment
Trees are well-known for their pollution-busting properties, but all plants are effective at converting harmful emissions into oxygen. A community garden is a small step in the right direction when it comes to creating cleaner air and repairing the damage to the ozone layer.
Building Communities
Gardens are happy places, providing respite from the buzz of the city and accompanying stresses. They give residents a place to enjoy the benefits of time spent in nature and they encourage outdoor exercise in a healthy environment.
Communities become closer when they share common goals and interests, which does much to foster harmonious bonds between residents and can help combat the loneliness of city living.
Thanks to these newly-formed friendships, neighbors start to look out for one another, which in turn helps reduce crime.
Skills Development
When you work in a community garden, you learn useful skills all the time. Getting the children to join in encourages a love of nature and helps them learn more about where food actually comes from.
Likewise, if you get unemployed, unskilled people involved, they’re learning valuable skills that could help them find employment as well as give them a renewed sense of self-worth.
Meeting new people in this way encourages tolerance and interest in your fellow human beings.
Building a Greener Future
Eating fresh unpackaged vegetables is a small way to use less plastic. It also helps decrease your carbon footprint, since there’s no pollution involved in transporting, processing or packaging produce that’s picked fresh from the field.
Despite the vast tracts of land dedicated to agriculture, the USA imports around 30% of its food products. Growing your own vegetables and fruit helps reduce the need for the caron-emitting ships, jets, and trucks involved in this process.
Gardens absorb water, reducing runoff and wastage. Community gardening initiatives like composting and organic pest control mean these places are self-supporting and don’t rely on harmful chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
They also attract bees, moths, and butterflies. These insects are vital for pollinating important crops as well as native species all over the world. Anything you can do to conserve these little creatures and create habitats for them contributes to helping the environment as well as securing or future food supplies.
Community Gardening Feeds People
It’s hard to believe that 37 million people in the USA don’t have enough to eat every day, and almost a third of these are children. A community garden helps to combat this by growing extra food for these impoverished folk.
By working with a charity in your area, you can do much to alleviate the burden on them.
In many remote areas, unemployment is high and supplies are expensive due to the long distances involved. Often residents of these neighborhoods have no options to shop at small convenience stores stocking unhealthy foods. In turn, this leads to ill health and further impoverishment.
Cities are notorious ‘food deserts’ importing every available source of nutrition from elsewhere. Even middle-class families are feeling the pinch thanks to ever-escalating food prices.
A community garden can provide much relief in places like these.
How to Start a Community Garden
While starting a community garden is a relatively straight-forward approach, it does take some planning. These are the steps involved:
Mobilize Your Community
Collaborative action is always best when it comes to projects like these. So, the first step is getting buy-in from your community. Set up a committee of like-minded people to help you in your quest.
It’s important to get local businesses and institutions involved too. They’ll offer much-needed support and resources to help ensure the long-term success of your project.
Once you’ve got a task team together set up a meeting with all interested parties to plan the way forward.
Secure Suitable Land
You’ll need to brainstorm ideas for the location of your garden together. For food gardens, at least six hours of direct sunlight is ideal and easy access to water is essential.
Another aspect is whether the land has adequate drainage. It’s not impossible to improve the drainage aspect of a lot, but this task can get expensive and is often time-consuming too.
Once you have a shortlist of suitable sites, track down the owner, and approach them as a community. They may want you to pay rent on the land, but they could also let you cultivate it without charge if they believe in your cause.
Either way, there’s going to be paperwork involved. Get a lease or agreement drawn up by a lawyer. It’s a good idea to get liability insurance too.
Set Yourself Up For Success
It’s important to prepare the land thoroughly before you plant a thing. Research the history of the lot. This helps ensure the ground isn’t laced with harmful chemicals.
Take samples of the soil and get them analyzed. These steps will help you take positive steps toward creating a healthy and sustainable garden. Your county’s Cooperative Extension office will help you with all the details on how to do this correctly.
Plan Your Garden Layout
Every piece of land is unique and you’ll need to plan carefully to ensure you get the best benefit out of it. If there are unproductive areas of soil on your lot, you could consider using those as work areas, or even a small recreational area for the community’s children.
Other aspects to consider as accessibility, security, and protection from animal invaders. Work out how much space you need for compost bins and storage areas and then plan your food gardens around those.
Research sustainable methods of gardening to find out how herbs, rain barrels, and native plants can help reduce some of the costs associated with caring for your garden.
Grants for Community Gardens
A community garden aims to save money, not spend it. If your committee finds that the garden is costing them too much out of their own pockets, they could decide to abandon the project.
Rather apply for a community garden grant from a reputable institution. There are plenty of these around, like:
- The USDA People’s Garden
- Captain Planet Foundation
- Whole Food market Grants
- Western Growers Foundation
- Veterans Grants
- American Community Gardening Association
With most of these grants, you’ll only have to find a portion of the money required to set up your garden and many of these institutions also provide ongoing training and support.
Once you’ve reached an agreement about how to pay for your startup costs, and who’s responsible for which tasks, it’s time to get gardening!
Getting Started With Easy to Grow Vegetables
Part of the garden planning stage involves deciding what to grow when. It’s important to focus on crops that your community needs, as well as those suited to the climate in your area.
Careful planning is essential to ensure your garden stays productive for as much of the year as possible. These are some of the easiest and most useful plants you can grow and when they’re at their best:
Beets
Beets are usually ready to harvest in the late fall. They’re easy to care for and once harvested they’re easy to store for winter too.
Cabbage
Cabbage grows pretty slowly but it’s pretty low maintenance and delicious when converted into sauerkraut and curtido. Plant them in spring.
Eggplant
Eggplants are long-lasting and productive plants. Make sure you harvest the fruits at their prime though, they quickly become tough and unpalatable. You can plant them in late spring and uproot the plants for indoor storage during winter.
Kale and Swiss Chard
Kale’s become famous for its many health benefits and it’s a no-fuss plant that needs almost no attention. Plant it in early spring and it will keep on giving you lush leaves for the whole season.
Swiss chard belongs to the same easy-going nutritious family as kale, plus it comes in a range of awesome colors.
Leeks
Leeks take over 110 days from planting to harvest, but they’re exceptionally easy to care for and usually ready in time for the fall harvest. Besides they’re delicious in hearty winter soups.
Onions
Onions are pretty much a staple in everybody’s pantry and they’re relatively easy to grow. Plant them in Mid-March for a winter crop that stores well.
Peppers
Peppers are high in antioxidants and easy to grow. Plant them in late April or May for the best results.
Potatoes
Surely everybody loves potatoes! It’s best to plant these nutritious, low maintenance plants in early spring.
Tomatoes
Tomatoes are the darling of every vegetable garden and every menu. You can get them in hundreds of different varieties to suit your climate and preferences and they yield abundant crops with very little maintenance.
You can plant your tomatoes as early as mid-January.
Other heroes of the veggie patch include pumpkins, marrows, gem squash, and herbs.
Community Garden Volunteering Opportunities
There are already several excellent community gardens up and growing all over the country. These are some of the best places to volunteer if you’d like to help the nation but don’t have the resources. They’re also great places to gain more practical experience before setting up your own community garden.
- Bonton Farms
- Chicago Community Gardens
- Common Good
- Urban Harvest
- Maybury Farm
Making the Most of Nature
If you care about the environment and your community, community gardening is an excellent feel-good opportunity for you. Why not start working on a plan for your neighborhood today?
For more information on how to enjoy the world around you, keep reading our blog. Apart from finding out how to maximize your time in the great outdoors, you’ll also learn more about conservation and preserving those green spaces you hold so dear.
