Category — Community Gardens

Hillsborough, N.J Garden will grow from 2.5 acres to 5 acres with room for expansion in 32 adjacent acres.

Duke Farms opened a Community Garden in Spring 2011 to provide people with the opportunity to grow produce that is healthy for them in a way that is friendly to the environment. The garden began with 210 plots, and in 2012 expanded to 420 plots.

Duke Farms will offer plots of land for what foundation officials say will be the biggest community garden in the country,

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In Gowanus, a group from Feedback Farms works on planters to grow vegetables. Photo by Chester Higgins Jr.The New York Times.

Feedback Farms is an experiment in movable urban gardening.

By John Leland
New York Times
April 27, 2012

Excerpt:

THE city of New York owns thousands of slivers of unused land, and about a year ago, a group of Brooklyn gardeners had an idea: identify all the vacant lots in the borough, then help neighborhood residents take them over. They built an online map, then a mobile app, with information about the plots, including the names and phone numbers of the agencies that owned them. They called themselves 596 Acres, after the total area of unused public land in Brooklyn, according to city data.

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Photo by Deborah Geering.

Urban farming trend growing in Metro Atlanta

By Susan Mittleman
Atlanta’s Public Radio 90.1 FM
April 12, 2012

Excerpt:

At first look, urban farming in Metro Atlanta seems to be a growing trend.

But look deeper and you’ll find that for many of these farmers, it’s a way of life, rooted in cultural history. Especially for refugees, who are trying to rebuild their lives while working alongside local communities to serve each others’ needs.

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See video report here.

Dig In initiative

BBC
9 April 2012

A new project hopes to establish 10 community gardens on disused land on council estates in York.

The Dig In initiative, run by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, encourages local school children to grow vegetables and fruit for the local community.

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462 Halsey Community Gardens.

596 Acres is looking to expand into New York’s other four boroughs.

By Sarah Goodyear
Grist
Mar 27, 2012

Excerpt:

Tia Jackson’s family has lived on the same block of Halsey Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood for five generations. Kristen Rapp is a newcomer. Jackson is black. Rapp is white. In a part of town where the gentrification process has been grinding along painfully for years, the two might never have met if not for a sign on a fence on a vacant lot, left there by the members of a group called 596 Acres.

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Grayton Streeet Community Garden.

You may think that the great historic debate between communism and private property is over.

By Dan Charles
NPR
Mar 20, 2012

Excerpt:

But there were debates about this over the years. McClain wanted to keep it a community enterprise — as Karl Marx once put it, “From each, according to his ability, to each, according to his need.” But others thought there were too many days when it seemed that because everybody owned the garden, nobody really did. And there were days when it seemed that too many people assumed that somebody else would do the work.

“It’s just really hard when you’ve got a whole lot of stuff going on and only one or two people have shown up [at the garden], and they’re expected to take care of everything,” says McClain. “In August, when it’s really hot out, it’s just kind of hard.”

So last year, the Campos Community Garden laid out some boundaries of personal responsibility: Individual plots where people get to plant and pick their very own vegetables. McClain says she has to admit that it’s helped.

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Volunteers at C.URB, the site of the Penticton Urban Agriculture Association’s demonstration gardens, dig fence post holes at a work party last weekend, which also saw the assembling and filling of 11 new garden beds. Photo by Kathryn McCourt.

Sharing Land 4 Food

By Simone Blais
Penticton Western News
March 08, 2012

Excerpt:

The Penticton Urban Agriculture Association is hoping to turn fallow backyards into harvest bounty through a new program called Sharing Land 4 Food.

Chair Eva Durance said the program is designed to appeal to several different kinds of residents. People who live in apartments or other areas with little outdoor space can volunteer their time and energy to grow vegetables in someone else’s garden.

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By John Harrison
Publisher: Right Way
26 Mar 2009

The complete introduction to acquiring an allotment and getting the most from it, by the bestselling author of Vegetable Growing Month-by-Month.

John Harrison has been growing vegetables on his own allotment for many years.He uses many organic methods, working with nature rather than against it.He is passionate about the quality of our food and the ecology that supports us all on this planet.cHe has been a member of the Henry Doubleday Research Association (now known as Garden Organic) since 1976 and is also a member of the National Vegetable Society, currently serving as Secretary for Crewe and Nantwich District.

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Wayne is an ex-Black Panther and has fully committed himself to the cause. He says urban gardening is subversive.

By David and Sarika Suzuki
The Nature of Things
Feb 16, 2012

Kathryn Underwood introduced us to a couple, Myrtle Thompson-Curtis and Wayne Curtis, who have created a large community garden next to their house. They trade food, teach young people how to grow and cook it (they have monthly ‘cooking lessons’ which sound lively) and offer produce to people in need – for free.

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The proposed site would fit at least 21 allotments.

“I have spent four years trying to agree allotments for this site, but the items that they have brought up are never going to be done. North Somerset’s planning officers couldn’t run a bath.”

By James Franklin
The West Murcury
February 21, 2012

Excerpt:

A deal between the authority, North Somerset Council and developer Persimmon Homes had been struck to create new plots at Old Mill Way in Locking Castle.

But the extra costs attached to the deal by North Somerset planners would push the price above £40,000 – and beyond the town council’s budget.

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The community garden at Los Jardines de la Paz apartments in the Cully neighborhood.

Need land to grow your own healthy food? Want to add fresh, local, organic, and affordable produce to your family’s diet? Want to spend more time outdoors in a vibrant, enthusiastic community?

Annual Fees:
$21 for single plots approx. 100 sq. ft.
$43 for standard plots approx. 200 sq. ft.
$85 for double plots approx. 400 sq. ft.
$20 for 4′x8′ ADA accessible raised bed
Scholarships are provided to individuals or families who need assistance.

Garden plots are available at the following gardens:

Berrydale Community Garden • SE 90th Ave. & Taylor St.

Brentwood Community Garden• SE 57th Ave. & Cooper St.

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Trinity Cathedral Community Garden.

“It never dawned on us that they would remove the hydrant”

By Michael K. McIntyre
Cleveland.com
February 13, 2012

Excerpt

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The volunteer gardeners of Trinity Cathedral who feed the poor from produce they grow on a vacant lot on Cedar Road between East 35th and East 36th Streets in Cleveland fear they may have harvested their last bounty.

A missing fire hydrant threatens their urban farm. Their oasis in Cleveland’s “food desert” is in danger of becoming a desert itself. As many urban gardens do, the Trinity growers has paid a nominal fee through the City Sprouts program every year for permission to tap into the hydrant at Cedar and East 35th Street.

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The Perennial Plate Episode 90: Refugee Garden from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.

Perenniel Plate Video 90 – Jolly Avenue Community Garden

By Daniel Klein

This episode is about our brief interaction with a wonderful Bhutanese family we met in Atlanta. They are part of a community garden that integrates refugee farmers from around the world by giving them a piece of land to grow vegetables. Despite the challenges of communicating together, we picked some crops, cooked a meal and enjoyed each others company. This was one of our favorite days on the trip.

Link to Perennial Plate here.

“The community was ready for a garden like this. It was just the right idea at the right time.”

By Michelle Pak,
NRCS Idaho
January 23, 2012

Excerpt:

Eric Moore had a vision to grow a garden outside his office window. Moore, an employee of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Idaho, works at the USDA Service Center in Gooding.

For years, the back part of the Service Center property was vacant and covered in weeds. Looking at that weed patch always bothered Moore. So he was excited when he got permission from the landlord to start a garden there last year.

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“Lots of Green” Youngstown, Ohio.

“People are starting to see land reuse as a new approach to neighborhood revitalization in post-industrial cities,”

By Lee Chilcote
Hive City Media
January 15, 2012

Excerpt:

Since Lots of Green launched in the summer of 2010, the program has reclaimed more than 150 urban lots (about 17 acres of city land). Some completed projects include community gardens, side yard expansions, pocket parks, a storm water mitigation demonstration site, a block-long soil research site and a 2.5 acre urban farm.

“We now have five community gardens with over 100 registered gardeners,” Presley says. “We’re igniting innovative projects and empowering residents to get involved.”

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Helps to Feed 200,000 People Every Month

By John Cueler
growingyourgreens
Jan 6, 2012

From Irvine Wiki:

The Incredible Edible Park a 7.5 acre community garden in Irvine and is located at 15058 Harvard Ave Irvine, CA, next to the meeting of Harvard Avenue and the Walnut Trail and Metrolink. Southern California Edison has an easement on the land and after years of being empty and overgrown with weeds it was decided to transform the area into a park.

The Incredible Edible Park is one of the last vestiges of agriculture in Irvine and features beans, broccoli, carrots, lettuce, oranges, potatoes and squash just to name a few. The crops grown and maintained by the community six days a week and up to 1,2000 volunteers a year. It is subsequently donated to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County to help feed thousands of hungry families.

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The most expensive place in the country to rent an allotment is Runnymede, in Berkshire, which has increased rents from 34p a square metre in 2008 to 55p in 2011.

Royal Horticultural Society
19 December 2011

Excerpt:

Allotment rents fluctuate wildly across the country, with plot holders in Surrey paying more than 50 times as much for their plot as those in Derbyshire, according to a survey of allotment provision carried out by the University of Leicester.

Researchers found rents have gone up by an average of 21% in the last three years, and confirmed that allotment waiting lists remain high, at 86,787, although this is a drop from the previous figure of 94,124 in 2010.

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Contents – Instructions, cress seeds and waterproof tray
Materials – FSC Paperboard and APET tray

Escape to your allotment without ever leaving your desk and harvest your own crop in a matter of weeks (no wellies required!). Gardening is great for the soul and tending your own tiny patch will be rewarding and therapeutic.

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See larger format of the film here.

4o minute film

Director/Producer: Ella von der Haide
Produced in 2006 – Germany

Synopsis:

Community gardens are widespread in South Africa. Traditional methods and innovative technologies are being used to grow organic food and create communities. The community gardens are places of hope, solidarity, and sometimes of active resistance against official neo-liberal politics. The four examples from the film show three outstanding projects: Women Peace Garden in the Cape Flats,

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By Patricia A. Carney, Janet L. Hamada, Rebecca Rdesinski, Lorena Sprager, Katelyn R. Nichols, Betty Y. Liu, Joel Pelayo, Maria Antonia Sanchez and Jacklien Shannon
Journal of Community Health
Published online Dec 23, 2011

Abstract

This community-based participatory research project used popular education techniques to support and educate Hispanic farmworker families in planting and maintaining organic gardens. Measures included a pre- post gardening survey, key informant interviews and observations made at community-based gardening meetings to assess food security, safety and family relationships. Thirty-eight families enrolled in the study during the pre-garden time period, and four more families enrolled in the study during the post-garden period, for a total of 42 families enrolled in the 2009 gardening season. Of the families enrolled during the pre-gardening time period there were 163 household members. The mean age of the interviewee was 44.0, ranging from 21 to 78 years of age.

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