The Seattle area has an extensive collection of community gardens, in fact, if you combine the spaces in the near suburbs with the P-Patch system within Seattle city limits, there are about 100 community gardens publicly available.
I happen to grow my vegetables at one of these garden spaces. I live in a wooded area and do not have enough sunlight to support a kitchen garden, and if I didn't have access to a sunny area, I'd have to cry. At my house, vegetables become poor little plant victims. The darlings try so hard, but they just turn spindly and fall over.
Apart from providing all day sunlight for people like me, community gardens serve the greater good in a lot of ways. The space where I garden devotes more than 3000 square feet to grow produce for our local food bank — where we donate more than 9000 pounds of fresh, organic produce every year.
In inner cities, rooftop gardens are improving air quality and providing some temperature relief to urban heat islands during the summer. They make fresh food available where it is scarce — and it gives people the opportunity to eat varieties of produce they might otherwise find. And young people can learn about food:
The City of Seattle, Washington, Department of Neighborhoods’ P-Patch Program provides organic community garden space for residents of 70 Seattle neighborhoods. Serving all citizens of Seattle with an emphasis on low-income and immigrant populations and youth, the community based program areas include community gardening, market gardening, youth gardening, and community food security.
Our garden hosts school and special projects for teenagers. And a lot of our plots grow greens that our African neighbors like to eat, but can’t find in the United States. (Freaking delicious stuff, too.)
I love being a community gardener. The garden is a great place to go and unwind, and the people I run into are a mellow sort. Good people.
These gardens take a lot of work, though, and that work is done entirely by volunteers. If your teenagers need to accumulate community service hours, it’s a great place to look for opportunities. It’s also a way for a skilled gardener to make an impact — and you don’t have to argue about politics with anyone unless you want to. If you have extra seedlings and nowhere to plant them, a community garden might find use for them — and they can probably tell you which food bank will accept your 50 extra pounds of zucchini that appeared overnight during the glut. (Then you don’t have to stuff any into your neighbor's mailbox.)
Do you use a community garden? Do you live near one? What is happening in your garden these days?
I didn’t hyperlink this information in the diary body because I couldn't get it to format the way I wanted under DK5. I guess I am a Luddite...
Urban heat islands:
http://www3.epa.gov/statelocalclimate/local/topics/heat-islands.html
http://geography.about.com/od/urbaneconomicgeography/a/urbanheatisland.htm
CDC article on community gardens:
http://www.cdc.gov/healthyplaces/healthtopics/healthyfood/community.htm
The White House kitchen garden:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/06/17/a-healthy-harvest
Michelle Obama writes about the Seattle P-Patch system in her book, American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America.
Find a garden:
http://www.urbanfarming.org/garden-locations.html