April 20th, 2008
In Sacramento, city support allowed gardeners to save the Fremont Community Garden, which is nearly 40 years old, from being lost to a private development. After protests at city hall, an agreement was reached that saved part of the garden at the building site and replaced lost acreage at another location. Today, the Fremont with its neat raised beds, ADA granite pathways, 10×10 and 10×20 square foot plots, citrus trees and tool shed, has become a model of the thriving city-run garden that officials from other towns have toured.
Maynard says the 50-plot Fremont represents an emerging type of community garden that is more organized and better-monitored than the urban “guerilla gardens” that sometimes fell into disrepair and were reported for being overgrown with weeds. Instead of being viewed with suspicion, Fremont is considered an asset by the adjacent luxury apartment development, he said.
“We have $2000 a month apartments that look into the gardens, so we had to make it look nice. They sit up there and look at us, and we throw them a tomato…So it works out well.’’
Such cozy arrangements are popping up in cities everywhere, but especially in eco-friendly cities like Portland, Ore., which runs 30 city-operated gardens and Boulder, Colo., where some 1,000 gardeners work the plots in eight community gardens in and around the city.
Ramona Clark, who oversees community gardens program in Boulder, says the city started supporting its first community garden 30 years ago by supplying water to a two-acre plot donated by a Long’s Iris Gardens, a farming and seed operation (specializing in Irises).
Interest in that first garden grew out of the “counter-culture” movement of the 1960s-70s when certain people wanted to retain a connection to nature and plants grown without chemicals, she said.
“We owe a great tribute to organic farmers and old farmers who stuck it out, or they developed newer, better (non-chemical) growing systems,’’ she said.
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