I’m fascinated by your urban ministry garden. As a member of NCSU’s community garden research team and community psychologist I’m very interested in gardener’s perceptions of their community garden. Consequently, I’ve created a survey to try to gather more data on the subject but I need help getting the survey to gardeners. The link to the survey is http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=nXMet3Thd4z1o2lQcvpFaQ_3d_3d

I would love to talk with you more about this research and about the urban ministry garden.

Very best,
Seb Prohn
Psychology in the Public Interest
North Carolina State University

Interesting! I’d like to see us have a tent city here in Charlotte.

Right off the top, I’d have three suggestions about resources and research, then some odds and ends suggestions:

Contact the American Community Gardening Association, http://www.communitygarden.org. They are a coalition of community garden groups around the country, and a good place to start looking for resources. The organization itself may or may not be all that helpful – they have recently moved, have a new ED, and are still sorting things out – but the membership is a gold mine of experience and good will, and still the best place to find like-minded people to bounce ideas off. ACGA is certainly worth joining and supporting. Their current pres, James Kuhns, may know about a garden for the homeless in Toronto.

Try Yvonne Savio in L.A. County at the UC Cooperative Extension office. She has successfully run community gardening programs and can put you in touch with some very good folks out in Southern California who can help with both technical gardening and with organizing ideas (David King down in Venice, Teague Weybright in L.A.)

Check around to see if Seattle has anything interesting going on. They have probably the best organized city-wide community gardening program in the country, and they also have a tent city. Don’t know if any links have happened yet.

Also, I’d want to have the site’s soil tested for heavy metals, if you are in an urban area. Just to be safe. You usually can get that done as a donation, I’d check with a nearby college and/or Extension.

Start small, even just with a corner of the proposed garden area. Importantly, if you want to grow food you’ll need reliable water, so solve that problem as a top priority.

And pay attention to improving the soil with the best compost you can find (we got donations from our County’s yard waste facility – I’d avoid biosolid-based compost if you can, though there are hot debates about that now…). Compost means the broken down, black, rich stuff used to improve soil, not “mulch”, ground up bark laid on the ground. If this vocabulary is really alien to you, get a knowledgeable person (urban farmer from a Farmers’ Market, extension agent, very experienced gardener…) to help you.

You don’t need to make boxes for your beds, which costs $$$ – unless the underlying soil is just impossible to work.

On design, involve the people who will be gardening as soon as you can, including reps from the tent city residents. Decide on whether you want the garden to be a group project, where volunteers and residents of the tent city join forces to grow food for distribution – like a coop farm – or if you want to set up individual plots. We have something of a hybrid, though we began as a group project.

The neighbors (homeless folks) who come to us have asked repeatedly for individual plots, though we’re not sure how that would work. Our compromise has been to create a “you pick” section open to all for picking (as opposed to harvesting for the soup kitchen). This has worked well, at least in terms of keeping people from “ripping off” the soup kitchen garden, which became an issue for volunteers and neighbors involved in the garden. What would happen is neighbors would work hard, then have all the tomatoes disappear the night before harvest when somebody who hadn’t helped at all would pick and go sell the produce. Instead, now, anyone can pick whatever they want from the You Pick garden, and the “main garden” is pretty much left alone.

I’ve gone on too long, sorry – send me any questions, I’d be glad to help. I grew up in the west San Fernando Valley where my dad still lives, so sometime when I’m out to visit him maybe I can drop by. Send some pics. I’ve found blogging about the garden is good to do, and opens some good contacts – you might want to try it?

Good luck!!

Yes, I do have a thesis, but have not PDFed it. I plan to one of these days – maybe next fall, since the garden season is upon us. But it is about nitrogen use efficiency in an agricultural ecosystem, not about the kind of work I’m doing now.

Nitrogen is endlessly fascinating, and a great study in scientific discovery, unintended consequences, hubris, and the strengths and limitations of “the market”. I tested two hypotheses, and my data roundly rejected one – the idea that, as you add more nitrogen, plant growth increases so much that it takes up all the nitrogen you add, so there’s little pollution risk. My data suggested, on the contrary, that generally the more N fertilizer you add to field crops, the _greater_ the pollution risk. I found, consistent with many other studies, that on average, crops recapture about 60% of supplemental nitrogen from fertilizer in the harvested portion, and 40% either recycles in the soil or is lost to air or water. That varies enormously from field to field, crop to crop, and year to year.

Since completing that research in the early 1990s, I’ve tried to keep up, but not as much as I would have liked. Biologically available nitrogen is now recognized as a serious problem as well as an important resource. Dr. Larry King of NCSU, who I got to meet, told me that a great mystery now is exactly what’s going on with N in the soil, where the activities of microbes make N sequestration much more complex than we’d imagined (I have to think of Elaine Ingham’s work).

Anyway, one of my only regrets about Charlotte is that there is no agriculture school close by. Anyway,there’s plenty of good work to do here…I just have to be careful to not go on and on whenever nitrogen comes up, so I don’t drive my friends and family away. TMI! TMI!

I’m right now forming a group of volunteers specifically to help with the garden – contact me please at dboekelheide@urbanministrycenter.org

Most often right now we have Saturday morning work sessions, but in the old days (before the Center built a new building right on top of our former garden!) volunteers came by all the time, and I’d like to move back in that direction. A lot of what we do is make friends with the folks who come to the Center for services, gardening with them over time and becoming resources, friends and sounding boards for them.

Thank you.

Tchuss, my sister, it is indescribably wonderful to hear from you again! See, there is some good to technology!

I’m not a blogger, so please, just reply to my e-mail account.
Hope you are well. Your project sounds wonderful.
Ciao!