I've always enjoyed growing my own vegetables. Last fall, a friend approached me about setting up a community garden. We found some unused land that was basically a junk yard and got the owner to agree to let us use it long term for a community garden in exchange for cleaning it up and maintaining it. We have been moving tons of concrete off of the site for 8 months and doing lots of tractor/dozer work. We put our first vegetables in last fall. We grew mostly turnips, mustards, collards, etc. Unfortunately, a huge amount of the yield went unused. This wasn't totally unexpected as it will take some time to get the word out.
So, for the last few weekends, we have been hard at it getting the spring garden in. Still have a long way to go, but so far we've put in about 400' of peanuts, 100 feet of green beans, 75' of peas, 75 feet of cucumbers, 150' of green onions, 60' of cantaloupe, 150' of yellow squash, 75' of zucchini squash, 40 tomato plants and 200' of potatoes.
Still to get in the ground, 3 colors of bell peppers, tons of corn, jalapeno peppers, cayenne peppers, watermelons, beets, carrots, rutabagas, radishes, collards, butter beans, mustards and mirlitons.
We have a total of 1 1/2 acres, so we will have a lot of food to give away. Basically anyone who wants or needs fresh vegetables can come get them. Hopefully, with the addition of so many other vegetables and a lot more publicity, we will have a lot more people take advantage of it. Our hope is to also get volunteers to come pick vegetables to deliver to elderly that can't get out and pick for themselves.
This is a huge step up for me as far as scale. It will be 4 of us taking care of the 1 1/2 acres. Hopefully all goes well and we can feed a lot of people.
Any gardeners here? If so, what do you grow? How big do you go?
Also, have any of you been involved in this type of community garden? If so, what were your biggest successes/challenges?
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