Community Garden Network Dinner Celebration at the Southside Community Garden
By Emma Castleberry
In late 2015, the urban agriculture organization Bountiful Cities conducted an assessment on the state of our region’s community gardens, small plots that are coordinated by dedicated groups of neighbors. One result of this assessment was the Community Garden Network, a member network of more than two dozen community gardens coordinated by Bountiful Cities. “The Community Garden Network offers free resources to the gardens in order to spotlight and further their successes,” says Isa Whitaker, coordinator for the community garden network. “Our goal is to help offset some of the costs garden managers are faced with such as purchasing seeds, tools and other equipment, and provide some infrastructure support.”
Specifically, the network facilitates resource sharing, gardening education, garden meetups, a monthly Community Garden newsletter, a free seed library located at the Burton Street Recreation Center and a free tool library in Montford. The network also helps manage volunteer recruitment and fundraising, while connecting area gardens with the support and resources of local businesses and gardening affiliates.
Isa Whitaker. Photo by Gina Palermo McFarland and Jillian Wolf
“Aggression and violence is said to be significantly lower among people living near green spaces, and they can also have the benefit of reducing the cost for local councils, as vacant lots can be magnets for litter and criminal activity,” says Whitaker. “A local example is the Burton Street Community Peace Gardens, one of the gardens in the network started by DeWayne Barton in the early 2000s as a peaceful response to the war on drugs and the war in Iraq.”
Many of the gardens in the network existed before the Community Garden Network was formed around them. Shiloh Community Garden and the Burton Street Peace Gardens, for example, were working with Bountiful Cities as early as 2002. Other gardens have since been added, including Elder & Sage Community Gardens, which was established in 2017. “Elder & Sage Community Gardens is an all-volunteer effort of mostly elder neighbors and allies,” says founder and garden manager Clare Hanrahan. “Our gardens of medicinal and culinary herbs, butterfly- and bee-friendly plants and vegetables have turned a vacant, city-owned gravel lot into an oasis of life, building community through shared efforts and demonstrating the inherent value of community gardens.”
Elder & Sage chose to join the Community Garden Network for “the mutual support, shared skills and ongoing promotion of the life-affirming and community benefits of cultivating local food,” says Hanrahan. “Community gardens keep us mindful of our interdependence with the earth. They revive and encourage an interest in others to nurture, cultivate and protect the living earth as a source of life for all species.”
In this year alone, the Community Garden Network has already hosted a number of value-adding workshops for its members, including classes on youth programming in the garden, climate resilient gardening, grant writing and botanical illustration. On Saturday, April 18, the network will host a Natural Plaster/Cobb Building Workshop with Alex Bergdahl and on June 20 there will be a Plant Walk led by Marc Williams at the Stephens-Lee Recreation Center.
To be added to the Community Garden Network newsletter, contact isa@bountifulcities.org. More information can also be found at Facebook.com/Bountiful.Cities.
