A Community Garden

The dream: a community garden that is a few steps away from the front door.

The goals:

1.) Feed the community

2.) Teach our neighborhood to grow their own food

3.) Get to know our neighbors by working together

I had this dream spark up when we moved into our new townhouse in January 2024. I saw a big patch of grass on the side of the building that had full sun and saw a vision in my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about it so I wrote out some letters explaining my dream and put them on my neighbors front doors, just to see if anyone was interested. To my surprise a majority of the complex was interested and asked for more information! Most people responded back with something along the lines of “I have never gardened but always wanted to and I have no clue how and where to start”

Just like that a dream started becoming a plan. The plan looked something like this:

1. Get or make boxes for us to plant in.

2. Figure how much soil would cost

3. Make a gardening plan with the neighbors

4. Put in the work

I got above ground boxes from a family member for free, got about $200 worth of compost, and spent about 5 hours shelving dirt into boxes.

After that I set up a time for everyone to meet in the garden to teach them how to grow and care for their herbs, fruits, and vegetables.

This took a while and by March I was able to put the raised beds in with the soil. By end of March we had all of our plants put into boxes and officially started growing in our brand new community garden!!

• March 19 2024

  The boxes arrive!

  

• March 28 2024

  Went out and got some plants for the boxes!

  

• March 30 2024

  We put some boxes down with soil. All the neighbors got together and planted the plants they wanted! After this morning we also had the realization that we may need more boxes due to more people wanted to be involved! (great problem to have)

  

• April 1 2024

  Went out and gathered some more boxes and soil!

  

• April 10 2024

  Got our first strawberry out of the garden!

  

• May 15 2024

  The garden started to really grow and grow vegetables!!

  

  

  

  

• June 1 2024

  Some photos of our first few days of harvest!

  

  

  

• June 5 2024

  The garden keeps on growing!

  

• June 12 2024

  We run into our first pest issues in the garden. These little beetles start eating all of our squash!

  To get a hold on this we just spent some time every day going out and collecting these bugs in a cup and then put them in soapy water to drown them and eventually there were no more!

  

  

• June 20 2024

  This was an exciting day because my cayenne peppers were finally turning red!!

  

• June 20 2024

  We are having the final moments of our spring garden and entering our summer garden! so I go through and give a little bowtie as a marker to signify the ones we want to grow to maturity for seed collection.

  The point of this is so nobody eats these, when collecting seeds you want them to be mature so they don’t taste good anymore because all the energy is going into developing the seeds.

  

  

• June 24 2024

  Our tomatos are about to go off but I started noticing the bottom of them were rotting. This is called bottom rot, this happens due to lack of calcium.

  How we fixed it: I used dried up eggs, crushed them up, and sprinkled them on the top of the soil of the tomatos.

  

• June 25 2024

  The first harvest of tomatos!

  

  

• June 27 2024

  More people wanted to join the garden so we added some more beds!

  

  

• July 8 – 22 2024

  The next few weeks we harvested about 50-60lbs of tomatos!! Also harvested a lot of peppers.

  

  

  

  

  

• August 27 2024

  The garden has taken over. I weeded it and 3 days later the weeds were back. Abundance has entered our garden and the beds couldn’t hold it back, so I didn’t stop the blessings and just let the plants explode.