Building a Community Garden

HOST:

Urban life means close proximity to restaurants, schools and entertainment. It also means green spaces are harder to come by, sometimes resulting in a disconnect for city dwellers about the level of agricultural know-how it takes to make their favorite dish. It also means a dearth of space for urbanites to be able to plant and grow their own healthy food.

Enter community gardens.

There are an estimated 29,000 community gardens in the 100 largest cities in the United States. The average community garden generates 20 servings of fresh produce per 11 square feet and can lower household food security concerns by 90%. Besides producing food, they bring communities together, increase property values and encourage agriculture and nutrition education for all ages and ethnicities.

Today on Farms, Food and You, we’ll talk with Cheralyn Berry, Extension specialist and director of the Briggs Avenue Community Garden in East Durham. With almost two decades of experience in nutrition education and managing community gardens, she’s got a candid, down-to-earth approach to garden and people management and a unique perspective on the vital role of community gardens.

BRIGGS:

Briggs Avenue Community Garden actually sits on a 45 acre property owned by the Agriculture Foundation at NC State University. And the land was donated in 2003 and it has two streams that converge on the property and it’s generally flat in small areas. It’s very kind of a sloping land from the street all the way down to the back of the plot where those streams converge. 

When it was donated, that area of Durham was not fancy and shiny like Durham is becoming now. And it still is an area where there is quite a bit of affordable housing that still exists around there. McDougald Terrace, which is a Durham Housing Authority property, is right around the corner from there. And so it’s a place where people of mixed incomes can still live in Durham. Previously, the land was donated, but it wasn’t really touched until about 2010 when Michelle Wallace, the horticulture agent in Durham County at the time, broke ground on it with a grant from the Town and Country Garden Club to start it so that people could improve their home food environment, increase their food security, bring the community together in kind of a safe, open space where they could get support to grow their own food.

And since then, it’s really developed into a beautiful space where people from all walks of life are; the place really does reflect Durham. Durham is a funky, cool kind of place. It’s very food-centric, and community-centric, a lot of service-oriented people live in Durham. 

HOST:

Berry has been at the helm of Briggs Community Garden since 2015. Her role there has been to develop the infrastructure of the garden and community connections and, of course, teach people how to grow food at the garden and at their homes. 

BERRY:

You don’t need a lot of land to grow a lot of food here because you can grow food year-round here. So you can have a pretty small plot of land, and if you have the right group of people and the right technical expertise or assistance, you can keep continuous crops going all year round, kind of growing them bio-intensively.

HOST:

The benefits of growing your own food are far reaching, and not just for nutrition.

BERRY:

There’s nothing so nice as eating seasonally and being able to walk into a grocery store and walk right past the produce department because you have everything that you need. It also gives people not only the skill but the concept that fresh food is work. It’s expensive, so it saves a lot of money when you grow your own food because you don’t have to spend a lot on produce. But really I think, I’ve been a nutrition educator for almost 20 years now and sometimes some of the messages come out “just eat more fruits and vegetables.” Well that’s a problem if you can’t afford ’em. The fruits and vegetables aren’t subsidized like subsidy crops are, like soy and corn and wheat. So one or two pairs cost way more than a bag of chips most of the time. And it also requires growing it, washing it, things like that. So when people grow their own food, they understand they’re more connected to the earth, they’re more connected to their food choices, they’re more connected to the seasonality of things. And so it can really benefit people to just know what that’s like because it’s something that I feel like we have lost connection with because it’s just so easy to just go and buy it.

HOST: 

The 45-acres at Briggs means that there are a lot of different spaces to grow, and a lot of different people, ages and interests to manage.

BRIGGS:

So we have these different zones. One is the community bed zone, where there are a couple of master gardeners that kind of lead that and make decisions about that. We have orchard zone leaders that are extremely dedicated and take care of our educational orchard. And we have the pollinator zone, and we have the compost zone. And so those groups have taken leadership of those things because it’s what interests them and what they’re inspired by. And so my job is to get them anything they want, anything they want, because they’re dedicated. And so my job is if they’re upset or they need something, or they’re not being heard, I’m gonna stop everything and make sure that they’re happy.

And then when the more inexperienced volunteers show up, or somebody just drives by and says, “I really wanna get involved in this, it looks really beautiful, what is this place,” they can come in, and I can say, okay, here are the five groups that we’re working with today. Here are the five jobs, go ahead and pick one. And I kind of point out the groups of people because they could be, depending on their age, sometimes I can pair them up with a group. For instance, we have the guys and the boys are two groups. We have many groups, but we sort of have these little cliques, and the guys are the infrastructure team. They do all the building and things like that.

And the boys, they’re not really boys, they’re like 19 to 27 years old, but we call them our boys because they’re just these enthusiastic guys that come around. There’s like a rag-tag group that all met there. They all met just coming; they didn’t come together, they showed up, and now they’re all friends. And so when the guys are building something, our infrastructure team, I will take some of the boys and say go learn how to use power tools because that’s something that I know that a lot of young people don’t always get to learn. And so they pair up with the guys, and it’s great. There’s a lot of intergenerational work that goes on there. 

HOST:

It’s keeping those people of all ages and backgrounds coming back to volunteer that is the key to starting and maintaining a thriving community garden. The people are the heart and soul of a garden.

BRIGGS:

It’s getting a group of people together and keeping them getting along and keeping them inspired over the long term. So when a group comes to me, I always say that you have to really love people and have eternal patience when you’re working with people.

HOST:

Beyond people management, Briggs shares her must-haves to get a community garden off the ground.

BRIGGS:

My advice is to first make sure you have potable water. That you have to have, and it cannot be from a pond, it can’t be from a river, it can’t be from a rooftop. What I always say to people when they try to argue with me about the water source, I say, “Okay, if it’s your farm and you’re doing it, you know how to control what that water touches, so that’s different. But if you are not comfortable with a four-year-old opening the tap and drinking a glass of it, then you cannot use that water in a community garden because you can’t control what people do. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, and so you need to create safety around a group of people to maximize joy and minimize risk. And so that’s the first thing. You gotta have the water, and it’s gotta be close to what you’re doing. You can’t haul it from your house cuz you’ll never be able to haul enough during the summer. 

And then you have to get the group of people together before you put your first shovel in the ground, even to move the first shovel of soil you need, depending on the size of the land that you have and the group that you’re trying to either impact or feed or grow with, a minimum of three people. And that goes for a school, it goes for a church, you need a minimum of three people, one of which is an extrovert and loves people. Another one that doesn’t mind handling money in a transparent way. And then figure out who your three main people are and who you’re gonna engage, figure out what is the purpose of you wanting to start it.

And that’s gonna be really what guides you as it grows and changes. What is the original purpose of us doing this together? And that way, when there’s differences or bumps in the road, you can always come back to that. What’s our mission and vision for this? And the mission and vision will change over time and that’s great, but having a little advisory committee. I have a robust advisory committee of 12 people, some master gardeners, some community members, that really do guide me. I can come up with ideas or they come up with ideas and we all talk it over and we all work together and figure out who we can talk to, to make it happen. And they tell me how much money I’m gonna need and I go get it. So really the water and then the people, and then at that point, you can really look at what is it that we need and what is it that we have?

What are our assets and liabilities? And then contact, I mean anybody in the state can contact me and I can definitely talk it over with me, I do it all the time. And I’ve even helped people out of state. I’ll do kind of distance land assessments. If somebody’s in Asheville, I’ll have to do it by a distance, but if they’re anywhere, like any surrounding county that I can reach pretty easily, I’ll usually go out there, we’ll do a land assessment, I will engage there depending on the plot of land. You can have a district wildlife biologist come to your land. You can have a district forester come to your land. You can often have the soil and water department come out and look at your land. There’s a lot of, you know, do your free soil testing. 

These are all resources that are taxpayer funded that most people don’t even know that they have access to. Whether you’re a homeowner or you’re an organization, you can have all of these people come out and give you advice and they’re all gonna have their different opinions based on your goals.

So that’s where I would start is just you gotta have your water and your people and you can grow the people over time. But if you’re gonna start a community garden as one person, that’s very difficult to do and you’re kind of maybe better off doing a private business or something. But it really is customized for each individual situation.

Flexible, like a bamboo in the wind, <laugh>, you gotta be able to roll with it cuz the more people that you have, the more complex it can really be. But if you have the right people involved, you’ll attract other people that can really very much see your mission and vision for a project and wanna be involved in it and wanna keep it going.

HOST:

So what’s next for Briggs Community Garden? Keeping it a green space that serves the community.

BRIGGS:

It’s a pretty highly populated area around us. But it’s gonna be one of the last green spaces in that area cuz there are some forests still left in southeast Durham. However, they are knocking it down left and center to put up housing, and that’s for a good reason. There are more humans on earth, and Durham, and North Carolina in general, is a fantastic place to live.

And so we’re gonna see a larger population grow, so we really wanna protect that Briggs land as a public use space but have it food-focused so that there’s always gonna be a park that you can go to and get on the swings and play basketball and that’s wonderful. However, we would love to be able to turn that into something where you can walk down trails and everywhere you look there’s some kind of food growing, you know will still have the tulip poplars for the bees and things like that. But there’s a lot of pines there now. But we really wanna develop into something where we have different kinds of lower maintenance fruit trees and meadows for bees and a nut grove and a pawpaw patch in the flood plains of the streams and things like that. And that is in its planning stages now and it’s very exciting, so stay tuned for that. Call me back in like five years and see where we’re at with that dream. But I do have some very excited master gardeners and community members that have a little coalition that we formed. We’re meeting about it and looking for funding to do land plans and things like that.

HOST:

If you’re interested in learning more about starting your own community garden, visit the link in the show notes and take advantage of all the resources there, or give Berry a call, and she’ll point you in the right direction.

Thank you for joining us on Farms, Food and You. This podcast is a product of NC State Extension and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University. If you would like to support the show, please share this episode on social media and leave a review on your podcasting app of choice. We’d love to hear from you. Let’s talk soon!