Could you guys make this seem more credible? Many cities and towns these days have community gardens--places the city council sets aside for people to rent garden space and plant a few veggies or flowers. The question, though, is whether they are totally useless or not. To evaluate this, its important to look at how much time and how many bucks is needed to set the garden up. What it takes to maintain the gardens, and whether people actually use them and benefit from them. When you look at the big picture, community gardens in most large cities are awesome. However, as someone who visits the community garden in my small town every now and then, let me tell you, it is pricey, dicey, and
seedy but not in a good way, a real waste of space.
Usually city gardens need to be built from scratch. That means cities must buy and haul in all the
materials for the garden beds. If these are raised beds. They must buy bricks or lumber. Sometimes organizers of community gardens will get lucky. Someone will donate materials to them. They still have to have it moved on site, though. Also, many community gardens requires loads
and loads of dirt . . . and fertilizer . . . plus, an irrigation system. Its takes a lot to make a garden from zilch. The costs can far outweigh the benefits in small communities. Larger cities can make
this work. They have more options for materials. They also have more people using the completed garden.
The next important thing to look at is how the community keeps up the garden. Often community gardens require it’s renters to spend a certain amount of time weeding and watering the garden. While this might sound good in theory, my experience is that people rarely follow through. They usually start out doing a bang-up job in the spring during planting time, but then their lives get more and more swamped, so they disregards this commitment. If a city is large enough to have someone on site. Maintenance is not as big of a deal. However, in my small
community garden, no one is ever around. In fact, weeds are the reigning “vegetable” growing in our community garden. This makes our town’s community garden a complete joke.