Natalie Walsh exudes warmth when we speak on the phone from her home in Saratoga Springs, New York. The former journalist turned master gardener is getting ready for a trip across North America to look at community gardens in Canada and the United States. But this isn’t her first journey into the heart of the continent’s collective gardening movement.
Last year Natalie travelled 13,000 miles across the lower US states and Hawaii, stopping at neighborhood gardens along the way. Since learning to grow food in her grandmother’s garden back in the Bronx, she has fostered a passion for gardening in community—and learning all she can about how to make that experience the best it can be. This passion spills over into the work Natalie does with the American Community Gardening Association, where she is a board member, and the help she offers to community gardens in the Saratoga Springs area.
To date Natalie has helped create a number of neighborhood gardens from the ground up. Through this work and her travels, she’s noticed community gardens share much in common.
“People are looking for ways to be connected,” she says. “It’s community gardening, and I think the community part of it is just as important as the gardening part.”
Natalie was kind enough to speak with us about some of the things that make community gardens vibrant and successful. Whether your garden is in the planning stages or up and running, consider including one or more of the ideas below.
Young garden enthusiasts learn how to make worm farms in their local community garden. Photo ©Natalie Walsh.
1. Provide educational opportunities.
After her first community garden was up and running, Natalie worked on a garden in Moreau, New York that included ten raised beds just for children. Here she taught weekly gardening classes and grew things for the children to harvest and taste.
“I would teach them about bugs and diseases,” Natalie says. “One of the boys had a problem with his tomatoes, and one of the younger boys said, ‘Let me see if I can help you.’ He had the skills and was able to communicate them, because growing food brings confidence.”
In this case, the beds reserved for children were 4 feet x 8 feet. They provided a social space, as well as a vehicle for learning.
“With the young ones, I think the community garden helped them connect with one another as they were working with the earth, and with that sense of nourishing oneself while also growing food.”
Related:
2. Make spaces for the elderly.
From her earliest days of gardening, Natalie noticed that elderly visitors to gardens really wanted to talk about their memories of plants. “Plants with fragrances would bring back memories most of all,” she says, noting how mint and other herbs would provoke these reminiscences. “They would touch it and smell it and say, ‘oh I remember using this,’ and then they’d tell you a story about it.”
But elderly gardeners have much to share beyond reminiscences. When Natalie hosted a fairy festival at the Saratoga community garden, she searched for people who could run a sales table. After asking at the local senior’s center, she learned that the seniors there were looking for ways to connect with young people. A partnership formed that saw those seniors act as ‘grandparents’ to the garden’s younger visitors.
“Everyone loved it,” she says. “All the seniors who participated the first year said they want to come back. It’s just a matter of people being good to one another.”
3. Remember the birds and the bees.
In one of the gardens Natalie worked on, at-risk youth grew tomatoes in raised beds. But the youth weren’t happy with the stark-looking design: they wanted more engagement.
To help with this, Natalie recommended creating flowerbeds that enveloped the back of the garden, drawing in monarch butterflies and other beneficial insects. A birdbath added to the garden provided an attraction for the birds and offered something beautiful to look at.
“That’s one of the ways to make any community garden more engaging. Put in picnic tables, benches, and water fountains—which are usually just a birdbath—and include a solar sprinkler so you have the water sound, which is very relaxing.”
Related:
4. Add showstoppers (like a sunflower house).
At the Pitney Meadows garden, located on 166 acres of preserved farmland in Saratoga Springs, Natalie planted a whole field of sunflowers. “We wanted people to see them from the road so they’d come visit and find out what the garden was all about.”
At the same location, she worked with youth to create a beautiful sunflower house meant for children. This involved planting sunflowers around a big empty rectangle, and adding a concealed door “that you had to backtrack to enter.”
Even though there were tables and chairs nearby, the sunflower house gave children their own space. Here the garden committee offered a reading program led by a retired teacher.
“But adults found their way into it,” Natalie says, noting how one afternoon, she heard voices coming from the house. Poking her head inside, she found two men in their 80s enjoying the silence surrounded by sunflowers. “Is this allowed?” they asked.
Pretty soon photographers started to visit the garden to take pictures and others followed. At the end of the season, Natalie and others sold the dried sunflower heads for seed as a fundraiser. Their presence had been an integral part of attracting people to the garden.
A fairy festival queen celebrates during a community garden event. Photo ©Natalie Walsh.
5. Listen to every idea.
Another time, girl scouts built six little fairy houses in one of Natalie’s community gardens. “This touched people in such a way that I ended giving them a large flower border. What they created turned into a fairy festival with 800 people. There was a fairy queen and a godmother, along with some dancing.”
Listening to every idea for the garden is important to Natalie, since “one thing leads to another” and you never know what people might come up with. Natalie has seen everything from pizza gardens (a garden made up of pizza ingredients and toppings) to monarch way stations to gardens supporting 1,000 people (in Minnesota). With community gardening, anything is possible.
6. Host a summer camp.
In the Moreau community garden, the federal and municipal governments, along with the local school district, funded a summer camp for children. The program included opportunities for campers to transplant seedlings, harvest and taste garden vegetables, hunt for undesirable insects, and make a scarecrow. This set the children on their way to feeling comfortable in the garden and increasing their familiarity with homegrown foods.
7. Plant a giving garden.
Also known as plant-a-row or grow-a-row, the giving garden is a row or bed planted for giving away to people who are hungry. Churches, soup kitchens, and local food pantries are usually more than happy to accept fresh, local produce for their charitable giving programs.
If you don’t have the space to add a giving garden, consider collecting extra produce from members to share with local organizations in need.
“For the last two years at Pitney [Meadows Garden], we gathered food from our gardeners and gave to the local food pantry. That was hundreds of pounds of food. Now we’re doing a garden that’s 25 feet by 50 feet—just to donate.”
8. Grow communal fruit trees.
While everyone can use a bed or two full of garden vegetables, not everyone needs their own fruit tree, especially if those trees are of the heritage variety. That’s because some trees produce more fruit than a family can use in one season or store for the winter.
In Greenwich, Connecticut, neighborhood gardeners planted fruit trees and shrubs around their garden for sharing. Natalie saw another design like this in Minnesota, where “an orchard of 12 trees was connected to the community garden…. Every family doesn’t need to grow their own fruit tree,” she says.
A brightly painted trellis in the Moreau Community Garden, New York. Photo ©Natalie Walsh.
9. Add an outdoor kitchen.
In one Chicago garden, Natalie observed how adding a kitchen to a nearby outbuilding increased opportunities for socializing among members. “On the side of the building were accordion doors that opened up,” she says. “Inside the doors there was a sink, a place to cook, and a refrigerator. It didn’t take up very much space.”
The simplicity of the kitchen kept costs down and expanded the connection between garden produce and home cooking. It was also a great place to launch potlucks.
10. Learn from new Americans.
In Nebraska, California, Colorado, and many other states, Natalie observed many new Americans working in community gardens. “There were so many different languages being spoken. Also the variety of gardening techniques: things that were unfamiliar and beautiful.”
In Burlington, Vermont, a garden planted by Vietnamese immigrants dazzled with a stunning variety of colors and a unique organization. “Their garden was like they’d opened a jewelry box,” she says, explaining how each vegetable was planted on a grid by color. “It was amazing.”
In other locations Natalie found new Americans sharing their knowledge with community garden members and learning new things in turn. Since everyone has different favorites and systems, their presence meant introductions to little known vegetables and methods, providing a rich cultural diversity to the garden.
11. Add a sandbox.
Across the country gardeners are working to engage youth and the community through agriculture. One successful element Natalie saw working in many gardens was locating a playground or bathroom near the growing area.
An even simpler—and low-cost option—is a sandbox. Natalie added one to her last community garden.
“One of our raised beds is a sandbox for children to enjoy playing in. There are trowels and pots so they can pretend to plant. They love it.”
Parents love the feature as well, since it gives children the chance to engage with the garden, try out tools, and enjoy themselves while mom and dad tend their plot. It’s also an opportunity for children to meet other children from the neighborhood—with similar interests.
12. Encourage members to ask for help.
Master Gardener, Natalie Walsh
While many community gardens see members tending their own beds, not everyone is around all summer long. Occasionally gardeners need a helping hand, particularly when they go away on holiday. They shouldn’t be shy about asking. But how can they go about it?
“We had a community gardener who knew he was going to be away and wanted someone to water his pots…but he was new and didn’t know who to ask,” Natalie says.
This member devised a way to let people know what he needed by putting a blue garden stake in his bed. That stake indicated, “I’m not around, but I need a hand, and if you don’t mind, please water for me,” Natalie says. “Neighbors loved helping, knowing he wanted watering because of the blue stake.”
13. Organize social events
Offering social opportunities in the garden expands the meaning of community. Not only can members garden on the same piece of land, they can share a meal, host a concert, and work together on common projects or areas.
“In one community garden that I worked on, you’re required to give volunteer time,” Natalie says. “So I would organize workdays, I called them busy bee days.”
These days saw members learning together while accomplishing common goals—something everyone feels good about.
14. Harness your members’ superpowers
When screening new members for those volunteer roles, Natalie asked the question, ‘Do you have any superpowers?’ This included playing an instrument, singing, doing artwork, and more.
People with superpowers didn’t necessarily have to volunteer by gardening, Natalie says. She told them, “’if you would play music at our next pot-luck, or make a poster, that would count towards your volunteer hours.’ Not everyone was able to be physical in the garden, but they wanted to contribute. And that builds community.”
15. Embrace the social aspects of community gardening.
No matter where your garden is located or how many beds it contains, it provides an opportunity for people to come together and do something they love.
“When I travelled across the country, I saw over and over again that gardeners did come together,” Natalie says, noting how gardening in community “nourishes not just the body, but also the soul and our understanding of one another.”
Joining a neighborhood garden means getting involved in a community of like-minded people who are working for a common goal. This can provide a respite in difficult times and help us better understand our differences and our similarities.
Says Natalie, “I think people are looking for ways to connect, not just with the earth, but with one another.”
Related:
Back on the road
To learn more about Natalie’s travels and the gardens she’s visiting on her latest trip, read her updates. For information about garden products that can help improve your harvest, visit Eartheasy’s Yard & Garden shop.
