Post Punk Kitchen Forum

I work for a nonprofit that builds and supports community gardens, and I wanted to share some of my favorite photos. If you have a plot or a favorite community garden or community farm in your city, please share that here too!

We have about 100 community gardens throughout the area, and are building more than 20 this year because demand has grown so much (woo!). Most are in lower income areas, and depending on the garden, it's free to about $50 for your plot, water, compost, and seeds and transplants for the season.

About a third of our community gardens are school-based, and we facilitate youth-run farmers markets in the summertime, particularly at schools located in food deserts. The kids grow food in the school plots and take some of it home, and sell the rest at farm stands. The kids get to keep what they earn, and they really do everything themselves, with some guidance from teachers, parents, and volunteers.


A student art show in one of our central Denver gardens. Check out those beans!


One of our Arvada gardens that is largely gardened by Hmong families. I love how vertical it is!


Rosedale Community Garden is one of my favorites. It's one of the oldest at 32 years, and they donate hundreds of pounds of produce every year to a nonprofit that delivers fresh, organic meals to people with life-threatening illnesses.


We also have a CSA, that in addition to growing for shareholders, has a partnership with WIC that allows low-income women with small children with to work with our staff for an hour in exchange for a huge share of veggies for the week. Anyway, this picture was taken right before we planted this year and I love it.


Thanks for letting me brag. I would love to see your community garden/CSA/community farm if you've got one!

Those sound like awesome programs to be involved with! And what an awesome bounty in the first picture!!

That is fantastic, Abbie!

Woot! My garden is in a community garden plot. :) I posted these already, but it was in that locked thread, and it's not like there was that much time in-between me posting these and Isa closing the thread, heh. So!




Also, I took these two today!
Pea flower (this pea plant was a 'rescue' from my work, it was sooo nasty/broken/uncared for, so I was pretty happy to see a flower)


My chamomile is getting huge! WOOT

SO beautiful and inspiring. I passed by my neighborhood community garden today and saw a baby bunny with a baby butterfly on it! See her?

Abbie, your job sounds so amazing!

Mars, I love your tile pathways and your hazelnut mulch!



Holy cow, you are the bunny whisperer!

idji, it is pretty great, I won't lie.

I want to work for you abbie.

Abbie, that's awesome! Btown is crazy for the community gardening thing. The food bank I use has a series of community gardens:

http://mhcfoodpantry.org/indexservices.html

That sounds like an amazing job, and I love the pictures!

I don't have a community plot currently, and don't think there are any in my area. But I have volunteered with Earth Celebrationsin nyc as a costumed garden spirit for years. This is an organization that had art parades to save community gardens in the east village. I think I've been in 7 or so pageants/events so far. Missed the last 2 years because of pregnancy/new baby though.

Here I am in the last one I did, (which is actually now for the Hudson river instead of gardens, since almost 200 gardens were saved in 2002), in the light yellow costume, "Solar Energy" with a spiral lightbulb on my head haha.

EEK! I'm getting farklempt from the beautiful.

How cool; I had no idea we had all this around Denver. We just drove by the Arvada one the other night and were blown away by all the plots!

Aubade, that costume is amazing. A farmer friend of mine went to a Halloween party last year dressed as a giant mama aphid. It was awesome.

jewbacca, I love so much when community gardens are connected to food banks, because there is such always such a dire need for fresh veggies in the pantry. One of our new gardens this year will be connected to a food bank and a greenhouse as part of a new hunger-free resource center downtown. It is the coolest thing.

hopshackgirl, you should totally join us for the bike tour this year (8/6), or the Multiculturalism in the Gardens Tour (8/20), or if you just want to hang out in a garden and drink free wine and beer and look at art, you should come to Art Farm (9/10).

panders, I will totally let you know if we are ever hiring. Pandas belong in the big mountains!

Wow, so many fun events abbierae! It sounds like you have such a rewarding job :) Embarrassingly, I'm not much of a bike rider, but multiculturalism, wine, beer and art?...Hello Mama!!! I'd love to check out the info on these if your org has a website or something.

I just saw this post, I'm sorry! Here it is: www.dug.org

So we just built a hoop house out at our community farm so that we can start our plants a little earlier. Here are our farmers with the baby plants:


And onions went in last week!


One of my favorite new community gardens of ours is at a new public school. All of our school-based community gardens are also open to the public. Check out the awesome pathways the kindergarteners did:


And there is a hay bale amphitheater! Some of those raised beds are planted with sensory plants for the autism class, and all the raised beds are built for kid-sized wheelchairs. There is a freshly planted pumpkin patch behind the raised beds, and apple, pear, peach, and cherry trees behind that.


I think this bean trellis that the 6th graders made is super cool. Bean matrix!


Behind the garden, one of our partner organizations has a small community farm and CSA, where the members are all in the neighborhood or families with kids at the school. A portion of the veggies grown on the farm go directly into the school cafeteria. Peeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas!!! (And lots of remay.)

I havent been to any events with my community garden (or heard of any going on) but it's still so awesome, me and the guy from the plot next to me often come at similar times and so we've started sharing stuff. So now I get to take zucchini's and soon cuckes whenever I want... two things I'm not growing. And he gets to take all sorts of my more fun herbs like epazote, lemongrass, pineapple sage etc. I'll probably give him tomatoes too when the time comes.

Abbie, I am so impressed with that set up, and would die to have a hoop house!

I haven't been able to help this summer like I had wanted to. With the move, the heat, and the kids it has just been impossible. I did get to donate 8lbs of food from the garden at the old house to our food pantry. Next year, I think we'll just reserve a few rows for the food bank. It really depends.

8 pounds is a lot! That's awesome.

Check out this monster chard from the Mitchell Community Garden:


And this is a plot from our Rosedale Community Garden:


It belongs to an 18 year old kid who has had a plot in this garden since he was 11. He used some of his graduation money to buy a shed for the garden, as a parting gift. What a guy.

squee!