Our Garden

                                                              Our Garden:

Written by: Alex Lopez, 4.13.2023

           

     Greetings to anyone who is reading this blog, my name is Alex Lopez. A neighborhood has serval aspects that tie it together. Whether through talking to your neighbors or hosting events in said place, this is what a community is. Thus, I want to talk about one aspect that, in my opinion, gets underlooked. This would be community gardens, which I'm an active member. They provide many benefits but the major problem they face is the lack of them. What I mean is that there isn't more effort in promoting them which leads to the city not wanting to fund them. In this article, I'll be discussing why they are important for any community, both financially and environmentally.

          History of Community Gardens

    Community Gardens, as the name implies, are gardens built by a community. Usually, these are built within neighborhoods. For a brief history of them, they first began to be popularized during the 1890s. This was a direct result of the economic recession at the time. One of the earliest documented gardens was in Detriot.

Mayor Pingree (fourth from left) poses for a picture with one of the gardeners (right) in 1896.

        A man named Mayor Pingree first proposed the idea of using vacant lots in order to help those affected by the recession. Specifically, as quoted from the Smithsonian Community Gardens' website, 

"Known as “Pingree’s Potato Patches,” the program provided unemployed workers with plots of land on vacant city lots, seeds, and tools, and instructions (printed in three languages) on how to cultivate gardens. While Pingree’s plan could not fulfill all the demand, it was successful in alleviating some of the hunger and poverty in Detroit.  The Detroit Plan was so successful that other cities from Boston to San Francisco developed similar plans. Participation in Detroit’s vacant lot gardening program, like most, tapered off by 1900 once the economy began to improve. Philadelphia, however, developed a particularly robust program that lasted into the 1920s " (Smithsonian Community Garden.org, 2023).

     It was from this point onwards that this design got improved. It would soon find itself in its modern forms. These mostly are found either in schools or, as stated before, in neighborhoods.

Problems Facing Community Gardens

There are many benefits to having a garden like this. Including but not limited to providing renewable sources of fresh products, helping with the ecosystem, and easy accessibility. As I stated earlier in this post, there are several complications as listed here:

• Getting Approval for a garden
• Securing Funding
• Deciding on what to plant
• Security

It's because of these factors discourage city officials from actually getting these projects off the ground. In fact, I can provide statistics of some states in California receive grants for these community gardens. The following is written by some members of Am J Public Health to the National Library of Medicine's website in 2003:

Am J Public Health, 2003

 Without these gardens, it causes a lack of resources for those with lower incomes. Not to mention how it'll lower CO2 levels.

                                                                Let's ask the people

To see how this issue affects the community, I asked a local member about their perspective, Yeho Lee.

Yeho Lee, 27

Yeho Lee is an active member of the garden community. In living an apartment with other tenets, they all share a garden that is accessible to the neighborhood. He provided this statement:

Conclusion

Now that we've gained an idea of how important these community gardens mean. They provide so many benefits that most people don't realize. That's why we must make more of an effort to have more of them, especially for lower-income neighborhoods. As I say, it takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a community to build a garden.

Sources

“Vacant Lot Gardens : Grown from the Past: A Short History of Community Gardening in the United States.” Community of Gardens, https://communityofgardens.si.edu/exhibits/show/historycommunitygardens/vacantlot.

Twiss, Joan, et al. “Community Gardens: Lessons Learned from California Healthy Cities and Communities.” American Journal of Public Health, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Sept. 2003, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447988/#:~:text=Community%20gardens%20enhance%20nutrition%20and,also%20emerge%20through%20community%20gardens.