It was a beautiful day today, I was feeling pretty good, and I had some extra time, so I decided to wander over and do some work at the community garden. Our city has a pretty good community garden program with over 400 plots spread out among around a dozen garden sites. I have gardened at The Garden of Eaton (name for its location on Eaton Street) garden site for about five or six years and last year started volunteering on the community garden's ‘leadership committee.'
All photographs by @veckinon
Once I was at the garden, I decided to get a few pictures. It is always great to get a look at things early in the season to compare it to how things look come harvest time.
Our garden site has 36 total plots. Some sites in the program have as few as 12 and one site has close to a hundred. Most of them are about the same size as ours though.
There are four plots in this picture. Mine is the one closest to the camera and takes up most of the frame. Everything but the tomatoes has been planted, but not everything has come up yet. The broccoli, cauliflower, and radishes are pretty obvious. There are also onions and peas that have come up, but are pretty hard to see in the picture. I'm still waiting on carrots, beets and green beans to show their tiny little faces.
There are also some enormous leeks that you can see in my neighbors garden. They started them last fall and they are looking great!
Here is a close up of some Cauliflower next to some radishes. I usually plant radishes between some of my slower growing crops. They don't use much for nutrients and are ready to pick before the other plants even notice they are there. So, effectively, you don't need any more space to grow them. It's like free food!
Those tiny little round leaf plants you see speckled across the garden are purslane. Many people treat purslane like a weed around here, but it is actually edible--being one of the best vegetable sources of omega 3s--and also is a great companion plant to many other species. In addition to creating ground cover and providing a mulching effect, it also supposedly draws up moisture and nutrients and adds nitrogen to the soil.
Some peas just poppin' up.
Some rhubarb flowering in one of my neighbor's plots.
A lil' tomato plant in the plot across from mine. I will probably wait another week or two to plant my tomato starts. Missoula, MT is in hardiness zone five and has a relatively short growing season, with frost-free days from mid-May to late September. Tomatoes typically will not really do very well until the average soil temp is around 65 degrees F. In Montana, waiting 'til the soil is this warm does not leave much time for the plants to produce, especially for many fancy heirloom varieties. However, planting when the soil is still cold can also prevent the plant from growing or producing to its full potential (this is also true with chilis). Personally, I prefer to wait until the soil is warm and then choose a fast maturing variety of tomato such as Early Girl or Jet Setter. This ensures good yields.
You can eliminate a lot of these growing zone related issues if you have a greenhouse. Not everyone, myself included, can pull off this option. You can also grow these types of plants in above-ground containers. The soil in containers will warm up faster than the ground. After having little success growing peppers, I started growing them in containers at my house instead of in the ground and have been a lot luckier.
We grow grapes and hops on the trellises around the gazebo. And there are some raspberry bushes on the left.
One of our gardeners planted an elderberry tree last year. I can't wait until it gets big enough to really produce. I hear elderberry makes a great wine. This is in part due to its relatively high tannin content.
A chive growing among the dandelions.
The inside of a tulip.
Our compost bins. These are actually what brought me to the garden today. In the very first picture, at the top of the page, you can kind of make out that the front of these bins was overgrown with tall grass and weeds. I cut the grass and weeds. You can see the pile of grass I cut at the end of the series of bins, just in front of a pile of straw. Afterwards, I turned the contents of bin two over in to bin three.
Mmmmmmmm, decay.
The tool shed.
Frank's memorial mural
There was a gardener here named Frank who lived right next to the garden site. He had been working the soil there in that plot that had the rhubarb plant in it since the garden site was created. He was kind of a fixture at the garden. He would regularly come out and visit with whoever happened to be working in the garden, pretending he had to check the sprinkler heads or some other random task. Anything to get him out there to socialize really. He always had a gorgeous, well kept plot. He really left an impression on everyone he met. He passed away last year at the age of ninety. I swear though, he didn't look a day over seventy-eight. After he passed away, his daugther and her family took care of the plot for the rest of the season. At the end of the year, we had a local artist design a mural to put on our shed in memory of Frank. After the artist copied the outline of the mural to the shed, a bunch of us from the garden painted it with a little direction from the mural artist. There was an article in our local paper about it.
A new gardener took over his plot this year. We always joke with her about the exceptionally large shoes she has to fill being in Frank's plot. She seems up to the challenge though.
Thanks for taking a look at my garden. Hope you enjoyed. If you would like to read more about how I got into gardening, check out this article...
Spring is Coming! Community Gardens and Grandmas
Best wishes,
@veckinon
I love these photos and that mural is awesome. I love the way it curls around the building. I want to come see it and your garden!
You should come by sometime. It is really cool! I go there multiple times a week (usually). I'll let you know when I am headed over there sometime.
Have you ever gardened at any of the community gardens around town?
No. I used to have my whole front yard as a food growing garden, and we had chickens in the back, and so on. And then after I left that place, its been 5 years very busy, intense times. I am looking forward to things slowing down enough again to even contemplate gardening. I really enjoy it.
What a great idea to bring the community together, I don't know why we don't have something so cool and organized here. Incredible!
So lovely Frank's story, imagine the knowledge that man had after living 90 years! I love talking to elderly people, they always have some great wistom to share.
How does the garden work? The city provides the space? How can a person get a plot?
It is actually a local nonprofit organization that runs it. They find land around town that isn't being used and ask the owners (sometimes the city, sometimes a private owner) if the space can be turned into a garden space. The organization then sets up the garden and the watering system and provides basic garden tools. People apply to garden there on a first-come first-serve basis. Once it is full, people are put on a waiting list and when a spot opens up, someone from the waiting list is selected.
You rent the garden for a yearly fee (currently 40 dollars a year, plus a 20 dollar deposit in case you abandon your plot and they have to clean it up) and then you can do whatever you want with the plot. The group that runs the program also puts on multiple free classes and workshops throughout the season to teach people about gardening and cooking.
The group also runs a couple of farms around the city that you can buy 'shares' in and have food from them delivered to your house regularly. In addition to this, they set up gardens at local schools to grow produce to supplement the school's lunch programs.
They are a pretty cool organization. The organizations name is Garden City Harvest. You can learn more about the whole thing here: https://www.gardencityharvest.org
This interests me A LOT, I'm so glad you've shared this. It seems super organized, I don't know if brazilians as a whole are prepared to have something so nice.
It's a great way to produce healthy, clean food, without having to pay loads of money for it at the supermarket (they might not like this). Also having this at school gives the kids the opportunity to learn something new, and the resposabilities it requires. Win, Win.
As I read about the project i'm already picturing many areas in my city where this could be explored.
This project should echo through steem, everyone should think about this.
It looks organized now, but it started with just a few people and one garden site. Everything has to start somewhere.
Those are some beautiful pictures :)
Thanks, they were the best of a bad bunch. Haha. I was pretty happy with the ones I ended up posting. I wish the mural pictures would have turned out a bit better and that I would have took some detail photos of it. But, what do you do? I still wanted to include them though.
that is pretty cool, I should tell my son about this place @jakeybrown, nice pictures. Looked like a lovely day there.
For sure, it is a great option if you don't have the space or the tools to garden at home. I love it, personally.
They can find more information at https://www.gardencityharvest.org
That yard is huge!
Thanks for looking. It was land that was donated by a nearby church for our community garden. Over thirty people garden there.
This is really an awesome post! I really like seeing posts about the community garden activity, it's a good way for people who can't garden where they live to have a garden.
How large is each plot?
Our town has a small community garden, there's 12 plots in it, each is 14 feet by 20 feet. I rented 2 plots this year because I don't already have enough to do, you know... :-)
I had 1 plot there for the 2 previous years, and the plot next to mine was empty for both years, so I rented it also and covered it with black plastic to kill the grass. I don't know if I'll actually use it this year or not, but it won't have grass growing in it anyway. :-)
The plots are 15'x15' and there is one community plot that people can plant extra seeds or starters in. The program is pretty successful and it is very rare that a plot goes unclaimed at any of the sites. Not every one finishes the season though. We check in with people twice a month to make sure they are interested in continuing so that we can get waiting list people in as soon as possible.
Each season returning gardeners get priority and can keep their plot or move in to any open one. If someone does not return, that plot goes to a new person.
As far as I know our community garden program is the largest in the state by far. Our community has a pretty varied history with regard to vegetable gardening and has been nicknamed The Garden City since the early 1900's.
How beautiful. You must really love it there. Elderberries do make amazing wine. They grow fast so should produce soon. We grow cherry tomatoes... they ripen well. Would love to grow big varieties.
Love this @veckinon! Gardening is my fav, growing food and useful plants adds so much value to my Life. So happy when I see others sharing joyful accounts of whats important to me :)
Getting into gardening has had a huge impact on my quality of life. I long for it all winter. Thanks for checking out my post.
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I love the pictures, and Frank's memorial. Seems so peaceful in you community garden. Thanks for sharing.