A community garden can help transform people who happen to live in the same place into a united community. It celebrates diversity in individual plots while creating opportunities for people to work together and learn from each other—about gardening, food preparation, and more. They learn to respect each others’ differences and to appreciate what they have in common. Community gardens build relationships that last beyond the growing season.
In addition, community gardens lead to a more livable environment, creating beauty and reducing crime (Hynes, 1996; Warner and Hansi, 1987), increasing home values (Been and Voicu, 2006), and improving the image of the community (Been and Voicu, 2006). The skills learned in developing the garden can be used to gain access to public policy and economic resources, which can then help address critical problems such as crime, homelessness, and urban blight (Armstrong, 2000).
In addition to providing fresh fruits and vegetables, a garden can also be a tool for promoting physical and emotional health, connecting with nature, teaching life skills, and promoting financial security.
Health: Community gardens provide a place to grow healthy, nutritious food resulting in both gardeners and their families eating a wider variety, larger quantity (Alaimo, Packnett, Miles, and Kruger, 2008), and higher quality of fresh fruits and vegetables. In addition, gardeners increase their physical activity and overall health (Wakefield, Yeudall, Reynolds, and Skinner, 2007).
Nature: For many urban dwellers surrounded by high-rise buildings and concrete, a community garden may provide the only contact with plants, birds, butterflies, and nature. Lessons learned in the community garden about water conservation, water quality preservation, environmental stewardship, and sustainable land use may be taken back to homes, businesses, and schools and implemented, improving environmental health.
Life Skills: In addition to a wealth of basic horticulture information, gardeners learn important life skills such as planning, organization, and teamwork.
Finance: Community gardens may have financial benefits for both the gardener and the landowner. Some gardeners sell the produce they grow. Others benefit by reducing the amount they spend on produce. Property owners may generate income by renting garden plots.
Participating in a community garden improves the health of the gardener, as well as his or her family, the community, and the environment.
Robert Rominger and John Moskop at the Goler Community Garden in Winston-Salem. Tended by employees from the Downtown Health Plaza, the Forsyth County Health Dept.
Community gardens are as varied as the neighborhoods in which they thrive. Each is developed to meet the needs of the participants who come together on common ground to grow fruits, vegetables, flowers, herbs, and ornamental plants. Community gardens can be found at such diverse locations as schools, parks, housing projects, places of worship, vacant lots, and private properties.
While all these gardens serve as catalysts for bringing people together and improving community, some of them focus on growing food for the gardeners themselves. Others donate their produce to the hungry. Some focus on education, some on nutrition and exercise, still others on selling produce for income. Some simply provide a venue for sharing the love of gardening. All community gardens provide opportunities for neighborhood renewal and beautification.
Types of Community Gardens
Plot Gardens: One familiar strategy is to subdivide the garden into family-sized plots ranging in size from 100 to 500 square feet. Sometimes a section of the garden is reserved for the community to grow crops too large for individual plots (corn, pumpkins, watermelons, fruit trees, grapes, berries). Gardeners divide the bounty from these shared plots. (See a design of a typical plot garden in the appendix). On a quarter-acre lot, there is room for approximately 35 garden plots, each 10 feet × 20 feet separated by three-foot-wide pathways.
Cooperative Gardens: In a cooperative garden, the entire space is managed as one large garden through the coordinated efforts of many community members. Produce from the garden is sometimes distributed equitably to all the member gardeners. Often these gardens are associated with communities of faith, civic groups, or service organizations that donate part or all of the produce to charitable organizations such as food banks and soup kitchens.
Youth Gardens: With the increasing interest in science and nutrition education, many primary schools in the United States are planting gardens to serve as outdoor learning laboratories. In the garden, everyone is transformed into a scientist, actively participating in research and discovery. Besides providing a motivating, hands-on setting for teaching skills in virtually every basic subject area, the garden is a wonderful place to learn responsibility, patience, pride, self-confidence, curiosity, critical thinking, and the art of nurturing. Usually, raised-bed gardens, or a section of the school landscape, are assigned to classes. Hands-on curricula and activities are selected to supplement and support the standard course of study for science and nutrition for specific grade levels. In some cases, school gardens require extensive volunteer support so that classes may be split into small groups of children to work in the garden.
Entrepreneurial Gardens: Gardeners, young and old, learn business principles and skills by growing and selling produce for local markets and restaurants. Many children have no idea where food comes from before it arrives in the supermarket. They have never seen a garden and have no skills in growing food. At entrepreneurial market gardens, youth learn not only how to grow food but also how to sell it at local farmers’ markets or grocery stores. As in 4-H, a leader guides the team through the entrepreneurial process that begins with planning the garden and ends with selling the produce.
Therapeutic Gardens: Still other gardens focus on horticulture therapy, using plants to improve the social, educational, psychological, and physical well being of the gardeners and their caregivers, family, and friends. Located in hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, retirement communities, outpatient treatment centers, botanical gardens, and other settings, therapeutic gardens are generally designed to be accessible to people with physical limitations. They may include raised beds and firm pathways to provide access to participants in wheelchairs, Braille signage for blind gardeners, special tools for gardeners with limited physical strength, and other accommodations. Therapeutic gardens may be designed for active gardening programs or as a quiet space for reflection.
Each of these types of community gardens has different goals and strategies for success. This guide will focus on community gardens with individual family-sized plots, outlining the steps in organizing a community garden.
Beloved Community Garden, Greensboro. Homeless men grow produce to sell to local restaurants and the community.
