Southside Community Garden (Sacramento, CA)

So, this is the other 2/3rds of the garden that used to be Mandella Community Garden and got moved down by the freeway. Now it’s called Southside Community Garden (see mural). Probably the crazy/coolest thing about the garden is its rainwater cistern disguised as a giant ladybug!

Gotta love the curvilinear gate, as well. I think that thing rising above the gate is technically called a bower. (I hear the artist was also going to include broccoli and shitake mushrooms in the composition, but it got nixed, for some reason.)

At any rate, it’s always good to have some permanent features in the garden that establish a sense of place and permanency even when the garden is in its “flat and brown” phase of the annual cycle. Here’s a panorama of the east half of the garden, definitely looking a bit flat and brown. In a few weeks it’ll be raging, though:

Southside Community Garden

Fremont Community Garden (Sacramento, CA)

Oh, man. It’s been way too long since I’ve posted a new garden here! Can my excuse be that it’s been winter, and the gardens haven’t been looking their most splendid, necessarily?

At any rate, I did get out to some gardens recently, and here’s one of my favorites, the Fremont Community Garden in Sacramento. This garden has an interesting history. Currently there are 50 gardeners growing food and flowers here, but originally the garden was even three times bigger!

It all went down in the early 2000’s. The garden (called the Mandella Community Garden, at the time) had been there “temporarily” since 1960, and finally the city decided to get around to building housing on it. People got pretty upset about this, as you can imagine. There were fruit trees, topsoil, a sense of community, neighborhood involvement—the whole nine yards!

Well, after a series of costly lawsuits and protests (people chaining themselves to trees, etc.) the city development agency finally gave an inch and allowed 1/3 of the garden to stay. They moved the other 2/3 to a noisy lot next to the freeway.

It seems around this time the leftover garden also got a major facelift. They installed ADA accessible pathways (very nice), brick borders and a motley assortment of art installations.

 

On my tour around the garden, I was impressed by the winter veggies (4-foot fava beans! In March!), the abundance of perennials, and the extra work that some of the gardeners had invested in their plots. Here’s one of the plots that was really going “above and beyond.” Check out those terraces!

This lavender plant was a friendly greeting at the entrance to the garden. It was also abuzz with pollinators! I spied at least one giant bumbler in the flowers. (A visiting entomology class once identified over 20 different kinds of pollinating insects in this garden.)

For a panorama of the entire garden, you can click on the image below. I took four photos and stitched them together with Windows Live Photo Gallery (which happens to be a free download-able program and highly recommended)!

Fremont Community Garden