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A community garden is a great way to get started in gardening if you've never planted or grown anything.
Question: Jolee,
Spring has arrived (down here anyway). I don't have much room for gardening out back and I definitely don't have a green thumb. You were recently involved in starting a community garden in Keller. Could you tell our readers how they could start a garden in their own community?
Answer: Jay
A community garden is a great way to get started in gardening if you've never planted or grown anything. For those of you that may not be familiar with its premise, it is a garden located in the community, perhaps on public land or maybe owned by a business or church. You can purchase a plot – some for as little as $1 – and they provide you with most of the things you need to grow your own produce. Most gardens provide you with a raised bed, compost and soil, mulch, water and other products for keeping pests away. Most community gardens are organic and do not allow pesticides or chemicals, and most of them give away a portion of their harvest. Some give away maybe just 10%, while others require 80% or more. Many times local food banks are the recipients of fresh produce from the local community garden.
Read the rest of Starting a Community Garden
KGI is embarking on a journey and I'm asking you to take one step to help us get there. Today, we're launching our most ambitious campaign in support of the global kitchen garden cause since our successful White House Garden Campaign two years ago.
Please join and support our Fork it Over campaign to raise one million dollars for food gardens around the world. That's a lot of money for any organization, especially a small one like KGI whose annual budget is under $100,000. Setting such a big financial goal sends three important messages:
What is this all about?
The Fork It Over Campaign seeks to strengthen the global homegrown movement by
It's a project of the Maine-based 501c3 nonprofit Kitchen Gardeners International and Part 2 in a series of major food garden promotion campaigns we're hoping to do. Part 1 was our successful campaign to inspire the First Family to plant a kitchen garden at the White House.
In this campaign, we're respectfully asking gardeners and public figures from the US, Canada and overseas to "fork over" some of their bucks and online buzz to the food garden cause. If we're trying to enlist these stars and raise these funds, it's because we feel the healthy garden cause needs a stronger voice in society. Last year, for example, the fast food industry spent over 4 billion dollars on marketing in the US alone. To some, raising a million dollars for food gardens may sound like a drop in the watering can in comparison. To us, it sounds like a very good start.
Read on: What will KGI do with the funds raised from this campaign?
It's a big goal with big risks, but the avantage of being part of a community like KGI is that the risks and benefits of our undertakings are shared. Plus, if we don't make a million dollar statement on behalf of food gardens, who will?
Thanks for donating and for sharing our Fork it Over campaign as broadly as you can with your online contacts ... back next week with the KGI April newsletter.
Roger Doiron, Founding Director, Kitchen Gardeners International
Community gardens in the United States are part of an international movement.... selected links to international community gardening and urban agriculture networks. In some of these international cases, community gardens merge into the wider reality of urban farming which includes vegetable plots in community gardens, food production in thousands of vacant inner-city lots, and commercial farms in and around cities.
American Community Gardening Association (USA) list of community gardens covers U.S. States, Canadian Provinces, and individual gardens in the U.K., Australia and Turkey.
The garden has always held a special place in literature – from hidden gardens to secret doorways, from giant plants to gardens that appear out of nowhere. And the Botanic Garden in Oxford is also strongly connected to literature. It was a favourite spot for the Liddell family to visit (Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland for little Lizzie Liddell); Tolkien often sat there under his favourite tree, the majestic black pine, which looks uncannily like Tree Beard the ‘Tree Ent’; and Pullman set one of the most poignant scenes in ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy on the bench under the witch-hazel, next to the Water Garden. (from Picnics inspired by gardens in literature, U Oxford)
This can be as simple as sowing some mesclun when you plant your tomato transplants. By the time the tomato plants are filling the space, you'll have gotten several mesclun harvests from the bed already. You could also plant herbs, such as basil and oregano, near your tomatoes, and make better use of your space while gaining some of the benefits of
companion planting; basil planted near tomatoes is said to improve the flavor of the tomatoes.
Certain vegetables, such as lettuce, carrots, corn, radishes, and peas, mature fairly quickly. If you sow a new row or pot of these veggies every week or two, you'll ensure a regular harvest throughout the growing season, rather than having a ton of stuff ready to harvest at once, then nothing after that.
As Pleasant notes in the article, devoting one row to "this and that" crops -- crops that you sow just a little bit of to add variety to your garden -- can hugely increase the variety in your garden and help stave off boredom. You could also do this with containers. Plant a pot of something new, such as leaf amaranth or bok choy. You'll increase your knowledge, try a few new foods, and make better use of your space.
