Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
serves as a location for your community as well as a workplace garden for employees. There are also
other types of businesses uniquely interested in community gardening, such as local nurseries, garden
and building centers, and hardware stores.
What makes this scenario work?
This is particularly beneficial if the corporation has health and
wellness initiatives for its employees. For related retail businesses, having a community garden nearby
or adjacent not only provides a built-in customer base but also serves as a living example of the useful-
ness of their products. The Peterson Garden Project established a partnership with a hardware store that
provided free gloves on a weekly basis for our Volunteer of the Week program. The store also offered a
10 percent discount to any PGP gardeners who shopped there.
Private land
If you've been eyeballing that empty, weedy lot in your neighborhood, chances are other
people have, too. Chambers of commerce and local governments are usually aware of untended empty
lots, so work with them to identify privately held property in your area. You can also go online and
check tax records to identify ownership. In some cases, owners of untended lots can be fined by local
governments if they are particularly weedy or unkempt. Your program could provide a benefit to the
landowner by tending the property. Partnering to spruce up the neighborhood by way of a community
garden can be mutually beneficial to all involved.
What makes this scenario work?
In these cases, it is best to suggest a short-term garden. The
landowner may have no immediate plans for the lot, but may want to sell or develop it in the future. In
rare instances, you may be able to talk the owner into donating the property to your organization, but
that takes time and relationship building. To swing this, you will most likely need 501c3 status. If your
time frame to start a garden is fairly soon, a good solution is to make an agreement for a short duration,
such as three to five years. Include an exit clause, so either party can terminate the agreement, with no-
tice of an agreed-upon time period, with no hard feelings.
If the land you are using is for a defined time period, it is very important that your community un-
derstand and buy into the concept up front. People get very attached to their gardens, and without con-
sensus on this approach, there could be hard feelings when the garden closes or moves at the end of the
agreement. You can't overcommunicate this point to your gardeners. Plus, if your first garden ends with
a mess of drama, future landowners might be less inclined to let you use their property. So frame the
agreement in a positive light with your community, and make sure everyone enjoys and appreciates the
property while they have it.
IS THE SOIL OKAY?
Soil contamination is a complex topic, and one that alarms a lot of people. While I strongly believe our
gardens need to be healthy places, I also believe there can be an overemphasis on contamination that,
in my opinion, scares people away from the natural world. If the site is just an average lot, there likely
isn't much to worry about. And if you'll be using raised beds and trucking in soil, the risks are further
reduced. The issue primarily applies to inground gardens where you'll be growing in existing soil. My
opinion aside, here are the basics on soil toxins.
The two most common sources of contamination, lead-based paint and auto emissions, were regu-
lated years ago, but harm to the soil is indeed ongoing. Environmental pollution in cities can also result
in lead contamination of the soil, and metropolitan areas often have elevated lead levels—higher than
