Over the last few months we’ve been following along with and visiting community garden’s in our area and afield. You might be wondering why we are devoting so much time to this topic so I wanted to share more about it. It’s been pretty eye opening for me as I begin to understand more and more how a community garden can be an invaluable resource to a community. This past weekend my little family and I headed over to Detroit, Michigan to visit with some friend and one of our hosts shared a funny story about the ‘hippie’ in the community garden and the current rant he’s on. While we found the story amusing I think it illustrates a pretty widely held perspective that the folks that work in the community garden are old hippies with wild rants about the government. This is changing.
Food is powerful.
When Susan visited the Railroad Community Garden in Oregon she found a modern family using their allotment to provide fresh veg for their family. “They were a low income family who had used one of the scholarships to get a plot.” This is why community gardens are so important. For many low income families access to a community garden is the most reliable way they can provide fresh, healthy produce for their families. You don’t need to have a yard, you don’t need to go it alone, you don’t even need to have an address to have access to quality produce. Of course you need to put in the work but for folks with more time than money this is not an issue.
The ability to grow your own food is empowering.
Every day families are forced to make decisions based on money not nutrition. When one meal’s worth of fruit and veg costs the same as two or three prepackaged full meals most folks would logically choose to stretch their dollar into the three meals. And what kind of a choice is that? Is it top-noch nutrition? No. Will it fill a hungry belly? Yes. And so the cycle goes. Give a family access to a garden plot and that family has the opportunity to turn the tables on that equation. It may be just for the growing season but still better than none at all.
This issue affects each community differently and so I encourage you to look up and see if your community has/needs these resources and get involved! We may have officially become the new ‘hippies’ with a rant to share.
Click below to see the latest community garden posts!
