What is a community garden?

A place where people come together to grow a garden.

An idea that people, plants, animals and earth are interconnected.

An action that feeds, heals, connects, and celebrates life.

*Credit to Mark Francis, who suggested a three-part definition of gardens.

Slow Food Nation Victory Garden (San Francisco, CA)

I’m kinda sorry to say that this garden is no longer with us. It was designed as a one-season demonstration project (photo-op?) in front of San Francisco’s city hall, back in 2008. As you can tell, the beds, made from bags of straw, were meant for easy disassembly, and planted with annual vegetables and flowers.
The garden showcased urban, organic food production for Slow Food Nation and Victory Gardens 2008+, plus about a billion other sponsors, government agencies and non-profits that have jumped on the local food bandwagon. (Yeehaw!) Also, veggies were donated to the SF Food Bank.

Kelsey (the on-site coordinator we met there) explained that they really hadn’t been sure how well things would grow in these experimental plots.  Fortunately, (with a lot of work by staff and volunteers) it turned out awesome.
 
Other city and state capitols have been sprouting more permanent gardens. The folks in Vancouver (Why are they always so ahead of the game?) and Maria Shriver in Sacramento are two examples. Growing food in public places has never looked so good!

Slow Food Nation Victory Garden

Growing Home (Chicago, IL)

Growing Home started out with a simple idea. The director Harry Rhodes described it this way:

We had this idea that getting your hands dirty and seeing something grow could really help change people, but we had no idea how it would work. We saw that people quickly became engaged. They felt like it was theirs: their farm, their chickens, their tomatoes. (source)

This market garden in south Chicago provides job opportunities for people who might otherwise have a hard time finding work or a positive role in society. Here people get to learn about growing food, earn some money, and simultaneously provide a valuable resource (fresh vegetables!) to the greater community.

These greenhouses, on one of Growing Home’s farm sites, are where employees grow peppers, tomatoes, greens, squash and all kinds of other vegetables. Staff member Orrin Williams explained that this project is part of a larger vision for improving life in the community. The food grown here is sold at local markets and partnerships are formed with a growing number of “green collar” businesses bringing jobs and revitalization to the area.

Aside from this garden’s function and purpose, the site has some other interesting aspects. What amazed me the most was the fact that these vegetables are grown in less than 2 feet of soil. Why? Because the entire lot is paved with concrete, and the underlying soil is contaminated with industrial chemicals. So, the garden developers decided to leave the concrete in place (to prevent upward leaching) and simply add a couple feet of fresh soil. It’s incredible that it works, but it does.

In Chicago, so much of the urban soil has been contaminated, that it’s almost a boon to start a garden project with a paved site. That’s a pretty sad statement about the quality of urban soil, but it is impressive to see all the ways that people are managing to work around the challenge. 

Growing Home

Green Youth Farm (Chicago, IL)

Green Youth Farm, run by the Chicago Botanic Gardens, gives teens a summer job growing real food.

Green Youth Farm has a few different sites, but the one I visited is in a lower-income neighborhood, north of Chicago. A select crew of teens hired from local high schools  get to learn about farming, running a business, working as a team and leading their peers.

Produce is marketed locally and supplements the program funding. A group of young, full-time staff members also work alongside the participants. They organize the training and keep farm operations going throughout the year.

Visiting in June, I got to see the early stages of the season: tilling the soil, weeding, planting….

The farm also has a bee colony that participants learn how to tend(in full beekeeper regalia).

Overall, I was really impressed by the positive vibe at the farm. People were having a good time, enjoying being outside and working hard together. I could imagine the great experience these young farmers were going to have during the summer, something to be proud of.

Green Youth Farm

Atwood Community Garden (Madison, WI)

By now we’ve probably  all heard about the High Line, a park created on an old, elevated railroad line in New York City. Well, NYC wasn’t the first fancy-pants city to turn a train track into a public park. Welcome to Madison, Wisconsin, ya’ll, innovators of the century.

Here the railroad right-of-way got sliced into three ribbons. On the left you can see the long and skinny community garden (woot!); in the middle runs the bike path (woot!); and on the right you can see a graceful swath of native prairie (woot!).

That’s three levels of awesomeness for the price of one.

At the left-most edge,  community garden plots go right up to the street curb. There isn’t a lot of traffic here, so it works out alright.

On the other side of the garden, someone has embraced the spirit of the bicycle. A rim for a trellis. Viva la bicicleta!

And I suppose this mural is celebrating… water? Anyway, it’s nice. They built a series of walls around the garden, just to put up murals. I might also add that this is the view from a lovely little coffee shop overlooking the garden-bike path-prairie.

Oh Madison. You totally rock.

Atwood Community Garden