Aug 4, 2022
I’ve never seen a garden before.
Community gardens are hard. Getting community engagement is hard. Getting volunteers to come out every day is hard. Financing the seeds, plants, soil, water, tools and space is hard. Gardening itself is hard. Weeds, pests, disease and weather all make gardening hard.
I worked in a community garden in Brunswick, Georgia for a number of years. I love gardening. Plump red tomatoes, sweet yellow peppers, bright orange carrots, crisp green lettuce, firm purple eggplants. Gardens are idyllic. Gardens are peaceful. Gardens bring you outdoors. Gardens are taken for granted. Gardens are unknown to some.
Brunswick is a small coastal city with about half of the people living below the poverty line. This community garden was right in the middle of one of the most impoverished areas of the city. When I found out that this community garden needed help getting things going I decided to lend a hand. Plus, I love getting my hands in the dirt! Pretty quickly I became sort of a de-facto volunteer manager there. One of the hardest things with running a community garden is finding consistent volunteers.
So, I just did the work. I took the lead with getting the 15-garden beds prepared, selecting plants, maintenance, harvest and other garden activities. After school and in the summer, we would try to encourage local children in Brunswick to come out and give gardening a try. One of the ideas was to get the kids from the local neighborhood, which includes two large government public housing communities, over to the garden and teach them a little about gardening, where food comes from and the like. I was glad to do that for them.
I think it was the second or third week that I was working in the garden that a young man from the neighborhood (I guess about 13 years old) stopped by and said to me, “I’ve never seen a garden before”.
Needless to say, that stopped me dead in my tracks. I looked at him and asked, “Never? Not even a little patch or one of your neighbors growing a tomato or anything?”
His answer was no. It took me about half a second to tell him to “come with me” (I’m a teacher by trade so this really bothered me on a lot of levels). As we were walking he told me his name was Anze and the that he lived nearby. We passed through the gate of the chain-link fence that protected the garden. around the shed that held our tools, and entered the 1750-square foot garden full of green growing things.
“Oh!”, he said. “This is what I’ve been seeing from the streets but I didn’t know what it was”.
I took him through every square inch of that garden showing him what everything was. He was incredibly interested and happy to learn. He asked if he could have something so I gave him an eggplant and an ear of corn ripped right from a nearby stalk.
With a big smile he ran out of the garden with his new treasures yelling that he was going to show the other kids. You see, this is one of the deeply rooted reasons that gardening does what it does. We must realize what a luxury gardening really is. Here is a child entering his teen years who had never seen a garden before! What a wonderful opportunity we have to impact people’s lives by supporting universally important goals of equity, education, and justice through the something as seemingly simple as a vegetable garden.
