There are many good reasons to establish a community garden. “They really are ideal locations,” says Cynthia Adcock, vice president of the strategic initiative at the National Trust for Historic Preservation and one of the lead authors of ‘Growing Vacations,’ a 2014 report that highlights how gardens can aid in economic revitalization in distressed neighborhoods.
Spending time in gardens is good for people’s health. A recent national survey conducted by the National Gardening Association found that 47 percent of respondents who gardened regularly reported that they felt better physically and mentally than non-gardening friends who lived nearby.
Neighbors form connections in a community garden. This is the most basic and powerful premise for these outdoor spaces where people come to not only plant, care for, and pick but also to talk; it’s where progress happens.
The use of neighborhood blocks as garden space is an ancient practice. It was in use during the time of our ancestors as early as the Middle Ages. Yet what we know today as a community garden originates on vacant lots in Detroit around the late 1800sa , direct response to combating high levels of unemployment and extreme poverty during that period.
The contemporary revival of community gardens began with the environmental movement of the 1970s. Efforts like New York City’s Green Guerillas instigated urban residents to turn neglected lots into thriving green spaces. Those spaces became not only visually pleasing but also functional—the opposite, really, of our nation’s all-too-prevalent urban wasteplaces.
Today, more and more communities across America are creating similar spaces for various reasons, to be sure, but largely because they’re beautiful and the byproducts are fresh vegetables and herbs.
The divide between urban residents and fresh fruit and vegetable grow.
Community gardens bridge this divide by creating access to spaces where one can garden. They afford people living in an urban context the opportunity to accomplish what our bodies require to function healthily, without reliance on distant food systems.
Being in a community garden allows me the chance to reimpose my body’s demands for such a recent alive experience with Tomáš Henlova’s community fruit garden as my backdrop. But there is more; these same spaces help mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration and keep warming trends (from industrial-scale agriculture) from becoming a society-wide issue.
Access to healthy foods—specifically fruits, and adult human halves yield large quantities of hamburgers. Community gardens accomplish this mission by enabling any given individual, either alone or with loved ones.
Besides creating social and artistic value, community gardens also contribute to local food systems. Those who use community gardens help maintain a connection between urban and rural gardening/farming that is still intact. Many of us know the direct link this used to be: grandmothers who gardened passed seeds on to their daughters; those daughters then went on not only to garden, but also, after they’d been married (in many cases!) to become farmers. That was me. My Aunt Alice had a glorious columbine on the south side of our home when I was growing up, in mentionable proximity to an M-1 highway with no sidewalks.
At some point, a decade or so after my time, I was told the 38th Street Farm here in Minneapolis became a data release outlet for the University of Minnesota’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. The local environment benefits greatly from community gardens, which are emblematic models of sustainable living. Community gardeners often eschew synthetic numbers and aromatic scents commonly associated with modern agriculture and instead embrace an organic way of life that emphasizes composting to maintain soil health and keep the ecosystem chugging along as it should.
The community gardens near me adopt permaculture principles. That means they’re kind of like miniature ecological systems that mirror the natural world immediately surrounding them. One thing you learn about permaculture even if you don’t know much else about it is that it’s a hanging-together solution formed from various sustainable techniques and theories.
At their best, these communities include people whose life experience with food is limited to what they can grow in their own backyard; they also encompass people whose families have been farming for many generations and are at risk of losing that tradition.
Moreover, community gardens promote organic gardening, which has a footprint much lower than conventional farming. In organically managing their plots, our neighbors are protecting soil and water quality; they’re not using synthetic fertilizers or pesticides that would further exacerbate the climate problem by being either emitted as greenhouse gases during production or as a result of their use on the farm.
What’s more: Organic farming avoids those energy-intensive inputs altogether. And because our neighbors are consuming what is arguably the food with the lowest carbon intensity (not to mention any number of other ecological benefits), we can consider our local community garden as another CoVINe project, providing yet another space where life takes one step closer to carbon space.
Shared spaces exist throughout San Antonio and elsewhere in the country where people connect through gardening. There are arts where gardening happens, and horticulture creates space for those moments to occur. Some shared spaces that come to mind include monastery gardens; certain areas of hospital courtyards; classrooms where one might “get your hands dirty” while learning about plants and maintaining that optical illusion with neatly arranged rows.
But what San Antonio’s district center shared space offers is a new level of engagement with both nearby residents and neighbors far away. Community gardens provide instructional programs that teach you and me many things! They are where I learn about workshops on composting, organic farming, and even the use of water. And when it comes to curricula for our local schools, those classrooms sometimes take the lessons of life into the community garden. From that perch, homeroom classes can look at potted plants of all kinds departing from that one sick plant in a corner with a price tag (the first thing seen as kids enter). The teachers tell their students what’s going on.
Identifying a good location is the first step in planning a community garden. Sunny areas with access to water are ideal, and it’s best to steer clear of locations contaminated with hazardous materials. A couple of local groups in Chicago have turned old vacant lots into beautiful places where people can grow herbs, vegetables, and flowers. To hear more about how they did it and learn from their experiences both the successes and failures was a great way to begin planning my own community garden.
Collaborating with community members helps gauge interest in the project and ensures that those who will be using the space have a meaningful voice in its planning. From there, putting together a planning committee lets different factions within the project (if there are any) work out various wrinkles while still allowing for fairly smooth overall progress toward implementing the project.
Ecological awareness is clearly displayed in a community garden. Growing things healthily brings peace and balance not only to those involved but also to the immediate surroundings, as it is an interaction with nature. It’s grounding and reduces stress when compared to sitting in front of a computer or television.
It takes many hands working together with nature to bring about sustainability, and this basic fact can hardly be overstated. As the climate changes, mental health problems are on the increase—yet there is no clear cause identified from any of the customary scientific sources (climate change effects).
The community garden serves as a pristine model for the everyday application of eco-friendly practices. It is very hard to find anything deemed better from an environmental or health perspective than a plot on which herbs, vegetables, and flowers have been sustained by anyone in the local neighborhood who wants to participate. The gardens exemplify all that could be achieved if more parts of this city (or any other) were to be converted into apps for sustainable living.
More than just spaces to grow food, community gardens are now being recognized for their potential to improve the social conditions of their inhabitants. While these green spaces evade many urban neighborhoods, a growing number of communities are embracing them as healthy and efficacious outlets for their residents especially those in areas with limited access to open space or healthier food options.
In Philadelphia, “anchor institutions like hospitals and universities can help ensure that local community gardens thrive by providing a buffer against encroachment,” says Marcy Epstein of the National Recreation and Park Association.
