July 23, 2010
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| Community Garden |
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Sarah Long, Madrid
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I think most people are familiar with the concept of a community garden in urban areas. In a larger garden plot, individuals and families can rent/reserve a small plot for personal gardening. This can take many forms. Schools, neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and many other community groups can come together to build a garden for a shared purpose.
Where I live, almost everyone has a garden of their own; usually in their back yard. This usually means big black rectangles tilled up in our neighbor’s lawns every year. Each person plants their own supply of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and maybe even some sweet corn. What does this mean? When July comes around we have more tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and sweet corn than we know what to do with. We pawn it off on our neighbors or ask around desperately trying to find someone who preserves or makes salsa.
I have a solution - Family Vegetable Garden Collectives. A group of families can collaborate on the crops they would like to see in the coming growing season, apart from the traditional tomatoes and peppers. From this list, the families’ individual garden plots can be assigned plants throughout the gardening season. Normally, if you wanted lettuce or radishes you would have to find a place in early spring to plant, and wait to harvest in late spring. This early season crop can overlap with the planting of other summer produce. This can be difficult to manage as one person.
If a collection of families can coordinate the planting of early season, mid season, and late season crops, a huge bounty of produce can be grown on less space and with less effort from each individual family and shared among them. For example:
Jones Family: Early spring crops such as lettuce, spinach, radishes, strawberries and early green onions.
Johnson Family: Late spring plantings such as tomatoes, cucumbers, late large onions, and peppers.
Smith Family: Summer plantings such as watermelon, or cantaloupe.
Moore Family: Late planting such as a variety of squash.
This means each family only tends a garden for a period of the growing season and benefits from the gardens of others in the collective.
Family Vegetable Garden Collectives can be as small as two households working together to get more from their plots, or as many families as you can gather. Make an event out of it. Each Friday families can get together to pick what is ripe and divide it amongst themselves. Weekly gatherings to collect and cook food produced at home can be healthy for your body, your wallet and your soul.
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