How does CGC build a garden bed?

This is one of our beds. We typically build 6 at each site.

As we continue with bed building for the spring, we thought you might like to know how and why we build the beds the way we do.  We selected our model to take advantage of the many distinct benefits of raised beds, especially in urban settings. They can be placed anywhere, even in parking lots!  This is an advantage to organizations that may not have in-ground garden space.  We bring in soil and compost which reduces any concern about soil contaminants.  With flexibility in height, raised bed gardens can also be much more effective for people of varying ages and abilities. Beds can be placed low to the ground for kids to work in, or they can be built higher for someone to garden from a nearby chair or stool.  CGC has adopted the raised bed model to take advantage of all of these benefits.

What does CGC use to build the gardens?  Well, the material that we have been using is rough cut, locally-sourced hemlock.  There are many other options for building materials, but hemlock is preferred for its natural resistance to rot and its cost effectiveness.  Other commonly used options are cedar (more expensive), pine (shorter life), and pressurized or treated wood.  Pressurized wood is complicated because manufacturers are improving the chemicals used, however for growing food, we still stay away from it.  CGC uses boards that are 2” by 8” in varying lengths.  This allows for a variety of options when planning and designing your garden.

 

A nice stack of boards for building.

In sourcing hemlock in Southwest New Hampshire, CGC has been fortunate to work with Great Brook Forest Products in Langdon, NH (www.greatbrookforestproducts.com/). They have been an excellent partner in this endeavor and have helped to provide a cost effective solution for us.  Great Brook harvests locally and sustainably in providing timber and siding materials for homes in the Northeast.  We now have a nice stack of hemlock that we can cut specifically to match the space requirements of our new partner organizations.  We are excited to keep building hemlock garden beds that will last for years to come!

~ Allan

Here are a couple of more links you may find helpful:

http://www.vegetable-garden-guide.com/building-raised-beds.html

http://extension.missouri.edu/explorepdf/agguides/hort/g06985.pdf

Building the first garden beds!

A pile of lumber, a hill of soil, a good supply of power drills, shovels, and buckets—garden bed building season has officially begun for CGC! We recently held our final workshop of the season at the Keene Housing Authority Building Bridges clubhouse. Representatives from our sites spent the morning learning how to build raised beds as well as learning some techniques for planting vegetables. The weather was beautiful and the hands-on activities gave us an excuse to play outside all morning!

We began the day building the garden beds. Our hemlock boards were locally milled and still very green, so drilling was a bit more of a challenge than it usually is. With the welcome warmth of the spring sun and a great group of people, though, we made quick work of building three new garden beds.  Two of the beds were 2 ft.-high accessible beds that we moved to The Woodward Home. The other bed was a long 8 inch-high bed that stayed at the clubhouse for use by the kids there. We filled the low bed with a mixture of soil and compost, then moved into the second part of the workshop.

During the second half of the workshop, we split into groups and rotated between four learning stations in the garden. The learning stations introduced topics as diverse as seed packet reading, trellising, square-foot gardening, and companion planting. We even planted some seeds in the brand new garden bed! Our time together ended with a delicious sandwich lunch (food always tastes better after a morning of physical work, doesn’t it?).

There were many great moments throughout the day—learning tips for operating a power drill, laughing about the funny shape of swiss chard seeds, witnessing some “aha” moments as people discovered new strategies for gardening. Most of all, though, I enjoyed sitting at lunch and hearing the conversation among all the site representatives as they shared their ideas and excitement about their new gardens. Even after a long morning, there was real energy and community around the table. Although this was the last workshop for the season, the work is really just beginning—I can’t wait for all the garden-building to begin!

~Susan

Garden Fun at the YMCA

Come join us at the Keene Family YMCA as we participate in garden activities, network with area gardeners, and think about how to support learning in gardens! Tuesday’s event is a part of the learning series for our garden sites, but we are excited to be able to open this one up to the public. We will start at 6:30pm and end at 9:00pm, wrapping up the evening with an ice cream social.

The evening will feature demos and hands-on activities by UNH Cooperative Extension educators, Jess Skinner of ReRootEd, and Monica Pless of Stonewall Farm and Antioch University New England (AUNE).  Also highlighted will be educators from Early Sprouts, Symonds School, and AUNE.   The event was made possible by the AUNE Student Activity Fund with ongoing support from the Rashti Foundation.

We look forward to seeing you there! If you aren’t able to come, please pass this information along to others who may be interested. Thank you!

~Susan

First Workshop Highlights

Last week, CGC hosted the first of three workshops for our new garden partners in 2012!  It was a great success with almost 30 attendees from all four of our sites and lots of enthusiasm for the new projects.

This workshop was primarily focused on learning how to plan for a garden considering specific site details.  We began the morning with some expert instruction and that was followed by break-out sessions for each garden site to brainstorm and develop a vision for their gardens.  Former CGC co-coordinator Libby Weiland professionally organized and facilitated the workshop and we were also fortunate to have Ann McEntee share her Master Gardening expertise with our new gardeners.  Each site created a diagram of how they would like to lay out their new garden beds.  Each site worked well together and came up with several ideas in furthering their visions of the gardens.

My favorite part of the workshop was having all of our partners together in one room for the opportunity to establish new gardening connections.  From the very beginning we had offers from the more experienced gardeners to help out the less experienced, and there were several offers for cross agency collaboration.  A beautiful community is beginning!

I know that the workshop was thoroughly enjoyed and that participants enjoyed several aspects including: brainstorming new ideas, working together, meeting new people, excitement for a new project, and inspiration to create community.  What a great list of takeaways!

Finally, CGC would like to extend many thanks to Libby Weiland and Ann McEntee for preparing an excellent workshop for us and for their efforts in growing our garden community.

-Allan

Perpetual Food Pledge

“As long as I enjoy the privilege of food security,
each time I shop for my own groceries
I pledge to purchase a healthy non-perishable food item
for members of my community who are food insecure.”

One of the goals of Community Garden Connections (CGC) is to increase access to healthy food in our community. The Perpetual Food Pledge is another initiative working toward a similar goal. The pledge started with our friends at Antioch University Los Angeles, and now members of Antioch University New England’s chapter of Net Impact are organizing the drive here in Keene (although you can pledge from wherever you are). The idea is simple: pledge to buy one healthy, non-perishable food item each time you shop for food. Net Impact has placed boxes out for donations at Antioch University New England that will be delivered to The Community Kitchen in Keene. Drop your donations in those boxes, or bring them to your local food shelf or anywhere that accepts food donations. The Perpetual Food Pledge website provides a list of healthy food items that are good choices for donation. Food drives are popular around holidays, but people are hungry year-round, so this will help provide a steady and diverse stream of food, even during the lean times.

With CGC, we are building gardens, strengthening collaborations, and playing a part in creating a new food system that ensures access to healthy food for all. While we work toward this larger vision, some of our friends and neighbors do not know where the food will come from for dinner tonight. Making the Perpetual Food Pledge balances our longer-term work with the immediate and constant food insecurity of our neighbors. For me, the discipline of buying something extra for members of my community each time I shop will remind me of the injustices in our food system and my commitment to improving the health of my community.

I have pledged. Will you?

Make the pledge here.

~Susan

Happy New Year from CGC!

The winter break has served its purpose for us here at CGC. The coordinators are feeling rested and ready to get going again for a busy spring season with some new gardens on the way! As the New Year gets started we are excited to welcome a new coordinator to our team: Maisie Rinne! Maisie brings to our staff a wealth of experience that will be instrumental in establishing our new gardens this year.

We are also reluctant to admit that we will be losing Anna Cynar as she moves on with her teaching career. We will greatly miss Anna’s incredible contributions to CGC, and wish her the best of luck with her next career step!

So, what will we be doing this winter? We have a lot of plans! We are looking forward to meeting with our new garden partners and assisting them with planning their new gardens. During this process of planning (and eventually implementation!) people from all of our garden sites will be participating in a series of workshops to learn more about how to nurture a successful garden. Finally, as winter shifts to spring, we are looking forward to the day when we can get that first truck load of soil and begin planting again!

Stay tuned as we will keep you updated on our progress!

- Allan

Food For All Forum

Community Garden Connections, along with many other community organizations, sponsored a World Café event to discuss issues of food security and accessibility in Keene.  There was a great turnout (over 70 people attended) which created a very lively café atmosphere!  Many different groups of people participated including farmers, students, faculty, and community members.

The World Café format was great for initiating conversation and for establishing connections.  Each table in a World Café has a particular topic for discussion and participants can switch tables to contribute to different conversations.   Discussion topics were focused on improving accessibility to healthy, fresh, and nutritious food for everyone, including:

• Making food more accessible to people where they live
• Addressing barriers of  cost
• Making healthy food available to people of all ages
• Improving access to information about healthy food
• Ways to extend the conversation to more community members

There were many, many ideas shared and generated, conversations furthered, and new contacts established.  We were excited to be a part of the Food for All conversation and also inspired by the interest that our community has for improving access to healthy food for everyone.    The conversations and connections made will be very helpful as we all collaborate to improve food accessibility in Keene.   Stay tuned to learn about more ways to get involved!

Allan P.

New sites for 2012!

We are excited to announce our new garden sites for the 2012 growing season! We look forward to working with the following groups in the coming year:

• Keene Family YMCA and the Kids InSHAPE program through Monadnock Family Services
• Building Bridges Clubhouse, a program of Keene Housing Authority
• The Woodward Home
• Keene Senior Center

Each group will work with us to build gardens at their sites and integrate them into existing programs.

Thanks to everyone who applied to be a garden site. All the applications were very strong and it was difficult to choose—we wish we could work with everyone! Please keep in touch and share your ideas for how we can rid our community of hunger and increase access to gardens and healthy food for all!

~Susan

Great Falls Food Hub Strategic Planning Meeting

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Great Falls Food Hub (GFFH) Strategic Planning Meeting.  GFFH is a collaborative between Post Oil Solutions and South East Vermont Community Action (SEVCA) with the mission/vision to “better the nutritional health of our communities and strengthen our local economies, while supporting the local farmers and creative food artisans who feed us.”  They seek to “provide food that is Healthy, Local, and Fair to All.”  The collaborative serves Windham, Cheshire, Sullivan and Windsor Counties in Vermont and New Hampshire.

The strategic planning session focused on GFFH’s three primary goals: 1) improve aggregation and distribution support for local food; 2) increase public awareness of local farms and food; and 3) increase community capacity to be food self-sufficient.

This group was filled with passion that carried the conversations and was brimming with energy for taking action, which helped greatly in our concrete steps planning!  Several Antioch students, including myself, joined the committee for discussing the 3^rd goal, which is really related to the concept of food access.  We brainstormed as a group, but tried to stay focused on attainable short-term goals for GFFH to engage in.  Some of the exciting ideas that came out were: a community and workplace gardens “help-line” or other mentoring network to expand learning on gardening in different settings; a Neighborhood Market and Healthy Convenience Store initiative; the expansion/creation of discounts or coupons for buying local food; and ways for farmers to donate excess food.

It was exciting to see that a number of the folks involved in the Farm Business Service Provider meetings attended this planning session.  GFFH is working to link up the work that people are already doing in their communities to concrete, coordinated efforts on a regional, bi-state level!

And opportunities for CGC’s involvement abound!

The food access committee’s next meeting takes place at SEVCA, Friday, November 4^th, at 4pm, for continuing this conversation on food access.  If you’re interested in joining us, please contact Libby at eweiland@antioch.edu.  This could be a great follow-up to our Food For All Community Conversation that’s taking place Thursday, November 3rd, 7-8:30pm.  FOR DETAILS SEE FOOD FOR ALL FLIER IN OCTOBER 27 POST.

Libby W.

Farm Business Service Provider…Network?

It’s past time to report on this great new network that seems to be forming.  Based on the purpose they’ve served over the past year, the meetings are currently titled “Farm Business Service Provider Meeting.”  The meeting is organized through Hannah Grimes and serves as a “Quarterly roundtable for organizations working to strengthen farm businesses and infrastructure in the Monadnock Region.”  CGC has been welcomed by the group and has attended two meetings over the past several months.

At the most recent meeting CGC attended, we were a part of a broader discussion about the group’s purpose.  Based on the evolution of this informal collection of people working on various aspects of our local food system, the group is asking important questions about our food system’s future.  For example, should we officially broaden our scope (and with it our name) to one that encompasses both the commercial and community aspects of the food system?  The question also arose as to whether a formalized network would be an even more effective way of collaborating.  Exciting!  Stay tuned as this process unfolds!

Libby W.