Community Gardens are meant to welcome everyone to the beautiful nature provided. The nature of the gardens allows nature to speak for itself and people come together to create something. These gardens help benefit children and families when interacting with one other. Community gardens provide fresh produce and plants as well as satisfying labor, neighborhood improvement, sense of community and connection to the environment. They are publicly functioning in terms of ownership, access, and management as well as typically owned in trust by local governments or not for profit associations.
Community gardens improve users’ health through increased fresh vegetable consumption and providing a venue for exercise. The gardens also combat two forms of alienation that plague modern urban life, by bringing urban gardeners closer in touch with the source of their food, and by breaking down isolation by creating a social community.
Community gardens provide other social benefits, such as the sharing of food production knowledge with the wider community and safer living spaces. Active communities experience less crime and vandalism
“We live in a world that has practiced violence for
generations—
violence to other creatures, violence to the planet,
violence to ourselves. Yet in my garden, where I have nurtured a healthy
soil-plant community, I see a model of a highly successful non-violent system
where I participate in gentle biological diplomacy rather than war. The garden
has more to teach us than
just how to grow food.”
--Eliot Coleman,
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