A community garden can help bring individuals who live in the same area together to establish a cohesive community. It promotes individual plot variety while providing opportunities for people to collaborate and learn from one another about gardening, food preparation, and other topics. They learn to appreciate what they have in common while respecting each other’s uniqueness. Gardening in a community fosters bonds that last well beyond the growing season.
Furthermore, community gardens contribute to a more livable environment by increasing house values, lowering crime, and improving the neighborhood’s image. We can utilize the skills in the garden to get access to public policy and economic resources, which can solve pressing issues like crime, homelessness, and urban blight.
The Advantages of Community Gardens
You can use a garden to promote physical and emotional wellness, connect with nature, educate life skills, and promote financial security, in addition to offering fresh fruits and vegetables.
Health
Gardeners eat a wider variety, larger quantity, and higher quality of fresh fruits and vegetables because of community gardens. Gardeners also boost their physical activity and improve their general health.
Nature
A community garden may be the only interaction with plants, birds, butterflies, and nature for many city inhabitants who are surrounded by high-rise buildings and concrete. Water conservation, water quality preservation, environmental stewardship, and sustainable land use lessons in the community garden can be back to households, companies, and schools and implemented, increasing environmental health.
Life Skills
Gardeners gain critical life skills such as planning, organization, and collaboration in addition to a plethora of basic horticulture knowledge.
Finance
Both the grower and the landlord may benefit financially from community gardens. Some gardeners make a profit by selling their products. Others benefit by lowering their produce expenditures. In fact, property owners can rent out garden plots to create money.
Generally, participating in a community garden benefits the gardener’s health of his or her family, community, and environment.
The Different Types of Community Gardens
Community gardens are as diverse as the communities in which they flourish. Each meets the requirements of the people who gather together to grow fruits, vegetables, flowers, herbs, and ornamental plants on shared ground. Schools, parks, housing projects, places of worship, vacant lots, and private properties are all areas where you can find community gardens.
While all of these gardens aim to bring people together and improve the community, some of them are specific to providing food for the gardeners. Others give their surplus to those in need. Some concentrate on education, others on diet and fitness, and yet others on making money by selling vegetables. Some merely provide a platform for people to share their passion for gardening. All community gardens contribute to the regeneration and aesthetics of their surrounding areas.
The Different Types of Community Gardens
Plot Gardens are a type of plot garden.
Subdividing the garden into family-sized plots ranging in size from 100 to 500 square feet is a common method. We set aside a piece of the garden for communities to produce crops that are too large for individual plots. Gardeners split the harvest from these communal plots. On a quarter-acre area, there’s enough room for 35 garden plots, each measuring 10ft*20ft and separated by three-foot-wide paths.
Gardens that work together
Cooperative Gardens: In a cooperative garden, several community members work together to manage the entire space as one giant garden. In fact, all growers sometimes get a fair amount of the garden’s produce. These gardens are frequently affiliated with religious communities, civic groups, or service organizations that donate part or all of the products to charitable organizations like food banks and soup kitchens.
Gardens for Children and Youth
Schools are planting gardens to act as outdoor learning laboratories as interest in science and nutrition instruction grows. Everyone becomes a scientist in the garden, actively participating in study and discoveries. The garden is a wonderful location to learn responsibility, patience, pride, self-confidence, curiosity, critical thinking, and the art of caring. In addition to offering a compelling, hands-on setting for teaching skills in practically every core subject area. Classes are usually allotted raised-bed gardens or a section of the school landscaping. Hands-on curricula and activities for science and nutrition augment and reinforce the traditional course of study for certain grade levels. In certain circumstances, school gardens necessitate a large number of volunteers so that courses can be divided into smaller groups of children to work in the garden.
Market Gardens with a Business Mindset
Growing and selling food for local markets and restaurants teaches young and old gardeners commercial principles and abilities. Before it reaches the supermarket, many children have no idea where their food originates from. They’ve never seen a garden and do not know how to raise food. Youth learn not just how to cultivate food but also how to sell it at local farmers’ markets or grocery stores at entrepreneurial market gardens. A leader, just as in 4-H, leads the team through the entrepreneurial process, which starts with garden design and concludes with selling the produce.
Gardens for Healing
Other gardens focus on horticulture therapy, which uses plants to help gardeners enhance their social, educational, psychological, and physical well-being. Therapeutic gardens are accessible to persons with physical disabilities and in hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, retirement communities, etc. Raised beds and firm walkways for wheelchair users, Braille signage for blind gardeners, special tools for gardeners with low physical strength, and other modifications may be included. Therapeutic gardens can be active gardening activities or peaceful retreats.
Finally, each of these sorts of community gardens has its own set of objectives and success tactics. Given that, the procedures for forming a community garden will be outlined in this handbook, which will focus on community gardens with individual family-sized plots.
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