Community Gardening is Sustainable Gardening
It’s April, and CoolMoms is naturally thinking of food. Aren’t we all? Even in an area like Seattle that has a bounty of good, local, seasonal food, February and March can feel pretty bleak. Well, April’s still not that great, but it has the decided advantage of nurturing our imaginations as we prepare garden beds, start seeds, and put our first starts in the ground.
Fun gardening with kids!
I’m a little new to serious urban farming and have a lot to learn yet, which has made communal approaches to gardening not only enjoyable, sustainable, and economic, but necessary for the education I get from my neighbors and friends. Two approaches some neighbors and I are taking this year will hopefully bear more than hypothetical fruit.
The first has been to combine seed orders. If you’re like me, even a small, sampler packet of tomatoes could fill your yard front-to-back with tomato plants by September. Yet, I still like to have a few different varieties: for sauce, for preserving, for popping straight in my mouth. A small seed-sharing get together at a neighbor’s house let all of us swap seeds. In some cases, we agreed each to do a set of starts and then swap once we have plants that can go in the ground. It’s easier somehow to keep track of twelve starts of the same tomato than four of three varieties (especially if you’re planting seeds with a 3-year-old!).
The second part of the plan is to coop garden within the neighborhood. In other words, rather than each person trying to a grow a little of everything, why not each of us grow a lot of a few things that grow well in our yards and then divide it up at harvest? This takes some organization and we’re starting small by deciding to share just a couple of crops this way. Hopefully, we’ll expand next year. Funny, though, that we’re doing exactly what my farming grandmother did with her far flung country neighbors.
I love the farmer’s market and will always be a regular. Still, to me, the goal is to get to the point where eating locally and sustainably means getting a large percentage of veggies from my own garden. Ideally, that garden will be watered with stored rainwater and fed with compost from the year’s scraps. However, the spatial, organizational, and informational challenges of making that happen can be daunting.
I truly believe that sustainable living means living less in isolation so that we can combine knowledge, resources, and elbow grease. With a 3-year-old, a baby, and a full-time job, the motivation and help of a gardening community helps me make bigger strides toward my goals and has gotten us all out talking and recruiting others to join in the sustainable party. We’re even talking about a harvest block party in October to share and swap surpluses.
I’d love to hear other approaches to or ideas about spring planting.
