Reporting & Essays - Community

Why community gardens are more important than you think

By Melissa Troutman

On a bright, crisp autumn day in Norfolk, Virginia, Becky Kiser digs in the soil behind Fellini’s, a gourmet pizza restaurant.   The community garden, managed by Kiser and several neighbors, grows quietly here amidst mostly urban landscape.  Ripe, round peppers don’t seem to mind the traffic just yards away as they hang from their stalks over herbs and a few weeds in a kidney shaped bed.  The curved walkways between plots, all scattered around a small utility shed and several rain barrels, create a maze across the small green-space.

With a lot of help from her neighborhood civic league, she started the free-form, pesticide-free Knitting Mill Community Garden in the early spring of 2001 as a project for a course that dealt with “what God can teach us through creation.” In her blog, theotherdayinthegarden.blogspot.com, she adds that working gardens like this one connect us with “real, physical life in the universe,” which is therapy for the soul in a society that spends so much time in manmade structures.  

Spiritual enrichment, however, is just one of the many benefits Kiser mentions when talking about the work she does here.  For $35 and a share of the work, residents of Norfolk’s Colonial Place neighborhood and beyond get regular fresh air and exercise, reduce their dependence on mass-produced food and are able to bring home fresh, organic produce.  

On their website, www.communitygarden.org, the American Community Garden Association, recognizes that “community gardening improves people’s quality of life by providing a catalyst for neighborhood and community development, stimulating social interaction, encouraging self-reliance, beautifying neighborhoods, producing nutritious food, reducing family food budgets, conserving resources and creating opportunities for recreation, exercise, therapy and education.”  Some additional benefits are cited on their website as well, such as increased property values and crime reduction in cities with networks of community gardens.

The benefits are evident in Norfolk and elsewhere. In Black Mountain, a small town outside Asheville in western North Carolina, the job market is minimal.  With economists saying we haven’t even begun to see the worst of the current financial crisis, residents are grateful for the willingness of the town’s Department of Parks and Recreation to establish a community garden.  Dr. John Wilson, a retired pediatrician that gardener Gavi Noard calls “the guru” of Black Mountain Community Garden, spends a lot of time there  nurturing seeds, teaching young folks, doing general maintenance and checking for pests and disease.  For $50 a year, Noard gets a long, narrow bed in the community garden and access to “water, hoses, shade cloth and weather materials, string, stakes, compost, lime, hay, rock dust, fertilizers, Rototillers, hand tools, education, cover crop seeds, [and] surpluses of vegetables…just about everything you need.”  The community garden also works with the local Food Bank to provide food for people in need as well as work and food for the homeless.  

Bev Sell, the driving force behind Norfolk’s Five Points Farm Market, at 26th and Church St., agrees that community gardens are crucially important.
“If everyone had a little garden on their patio or in their yard and shared it with a neighbor,” she says, “we’d all win.”

The market brings fresh, regional produce to city dwellers five day a week, 12 months a year.  But Sell is finding it difficult to keep up with demand from daily customers as well as the market’s maxed out CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscription program.  “The mean age of farmers is 58, and no young people are stepping in to take their place,” Sell explains.  “We are losing our farmers; there is a need for community gardens to feed us all.”

Sell acknowledges, of course, that big agribusinesses – the huge farms that supply most of the items in our supermarkets – are in no danger of disappearing.  Indeed, the United States produces more food than any nation in the history of the world.  

“That’s true,” Sell says derisively.  “If you wanna call that food.”  In a recent interview, she went on to talk about the “tragedy of high fructose corn syrup,” an ingredient in a wide array of mass-produced foods that Americans consume.  It can be found in soda, fruit flavored juice drinks, breakfast cereal, ketchup, jam, and stuffing.  Some studies show that high fructose corn syrup is driving up rates of childhood diabetes and obesity and some claim it contributes to other health problems as well.

Sell and other advocates of locally produced food cite many other problems with our current mode of food production and consumption:

-    Large-scale farms are reducing biodiversity by destroying natural habitat to plant many acres of the same crop.
-    An emphasis on growing produce that’s durable—the cultivation of tomatoes, for instance, that are hard enough to withstand long-distance trucking – has resulted in the production of bland food.
-    The use of pesticides poses known and unknown health risks to humans and the environment.
-    The average person has been completely disconnected from his or her food sources.  Most have no idea where their food comes from.  

Sell believes we have it in our power to change this paradigm – that Norfolk, for example, could become self-sustaining in terms of food production within 10 years.  Is it possible?

Organic farmer John Wilson (not related to the John Wilson in Black Mountain), who has been growing organic food since the age of 12 and has a farm in Virginia Beach, notes that “in this climate you can grow all year in a simple, unheated greenhouse.”   When I visited him, he took me through his greenhouse to the water tank behind the barn.  It provides him with more than enough water to irrigate, “and that’s just the runoff from one side of the roof.”  

In addition to supplying Five Points Farm Market in neighboring Norfolk, Wilson acts as a consultant to people designing organic gardens of their own.  Last year he helped Norview High School in Norfolk start its own Edible Schoolyard.  Shauna Tonkin, who found the grants to fund the project, has partnered with Dwayne Thompson of Sabrosa Foods to create an entrepreneurial component to the curriculum.  In addition to providing the school cafeteria with fresh food, students use their own tomatoes to make salsa that sells at Five Points Farm Market.

The first Edible Schoolyard, which started as a conversation between chef and author Alice Waters and former school principal Neil Smith at Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley, California, has been integrated into the entire school curriculum, from social studies and economics to science and math.  Students also have a unique opportunity to be part of the entire food process from seed to table in a gardening and culinary arts program.  The idea has caught on, as well as “farm-to-school” programs which link farms with educational institutions to provide fresh food for school meals and economic vitality for struggling small farmers.  

Community gardens are not new, of course. Before humans began planting and harvesting their own food, hunter-gatherers lived in small herds in order to maintain mobility and have enough food to feed everyone.  The very foundation of our civilization rests on the ability of our ancient ancestors to grow their own food.  Until the 18th century, there was little change in agricultural practices from the time we began planting, and it wasn't until the industrial revolution in the mid nineteenth century that nations were able to mass-produce food for ever-expanding, stationary populations.  

But over the years, community gardens have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity. In 1943, when "the wartime burden on the Nation's transportation system [made] it impossible to ship over long distances the normal amount of fresh vegetables and fruits,” the United States government called on citizens to start backyard and patio gardens.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Victory Garden Program cited many benefits of doing so, besides simply creating the supply needed to fit demand, stating “there isn't a better hobby…It makes you feel good. It relaxes your nerves. It's a family enterprise that brings together father, mother, son and daughter” and also serves to “promote neighborliness, sociability, cooperation."

These days, however, most of us get our food from supermarkets. And we’re generally unaware of the list of people and processes that must be in place in order to get food to the dinner table.  The list includes the supermarket itself, which must be open for business and have electricity to run refrigeration, lights and cashier machines that can must be able to read barcodes and credit card strips.  Food has to be transported long distances before it arrives at these stores, which means our current mode of food production and distribution requires enormous amounts of fossil fuel. There are also the processing plants to consider and of course the energy it requires to run the mega-farms themselves.

Now let’s say you get your food from a market that tries to get its products from regional farmers. There would be far fewer links in your food chain to depend upon.  But of course, the strength of each link is important as well.  A chain can be short and weak.  But a farm 150 miles away is much easier to visit than one that is in China, which is currently the 4th largest exporter of food goods to the United States.
If you have a sizable yard, why not plant vegetables?  Instead of constantly cutting back the lawn, you can concentrate your energy (or that of the gardener, if you are so fortunate) on cultivating food for your table.  If you have an apartment with a fire escape or balcony, hang a couple garden boxes off the railings.  And if you want to be even more environmentally friendly, consider attending a rain barrel workshop at the farm market. In short, be imaginative: use whatever resources are at hand.

Meanwhile, we should be preparing our children to embrace this new paradigm. We like to think that we educate our young people to equip them with the essential skills they need for the future.  Unfortunately, most of the school experience is consumed by learning skills and habits that will assist kids in getting corporate jobs.  While this is important, it hinges on the idea that our basic needs must be paid for. Sure, some of us work to have nice cars and the latest gear, but before all else, we work so we can put food on the table.  

Becky Kiser and others are working toward this goal. In addition to cultivating food, they are nurturing people’s spirits as they grow and care for their gardens. With the many other physical, social and environmental benefits that come with community gardening, it’s hard to think of a reason not to become more sustainable and secure by growing our own food and sharing the fruits of our labors with family and neighbors.  

If you’d like more information about the gardens and people that are already working toward better food practices, or would like help starting your own garden, email Melissa@thetreehousemagazine.com or visit the following websites for great resources and inspirations.  

• http://www.communitygarden.org/index.php
• http://www.revivevictorygarden.org/
• http://theotherdayinthegarden.blogspot.com/
• http://www.cityfarmer.org/CGNewYork.html
• http://www.sos.state.or.us/archives/exhibits/ww2/services/ag.htm - notes