Banking on Home Grown Goodness:
Community Gardens Find a Food Bank Niche

— Wylie Harris

“Community gardening” is a term tailor-made for truth-in-advertising believers. It means just what it says: communities coming together to grow food.

Often community gardens are in urban neighborhoods, where the grounds of a church or a school or even a vacant lot can be transformed into a garden. In Oklahoma City, the Urban Harvest program of the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma coordinates 25 gardens.

Chris Kirby is the director of the Urban Harvest program. She says the food bank took over Oklahoma City’s community garden program in 2001, with twelve gardens in existence.

Since then, with help from a grant from the Oklahoma City Community Foundation, Kirby has helped thirteen new gardens get started, mostly in the Oklahoma City metro area, but including three in Norman.

The food bank provides a “good, stable home for Oklahoma City’s community gardening program,” says Kirby.
The food bank also provides guidelines and advice on how to build partnerships to make a successful community garden.

“You can go into any neighborhood and start a community garden, but you need the support of the community to be successful,” Kirby says. “You have to get an investment from everybody to sustain a garden.”

To persuade people to make that investment, she gives presentations to interested groups. In turn, the Urban Harvest program rewards those groups’ commitment to community gardening, providing equipment, seeds, plants, and grants.

The food bank also cooperates with OSU to provide soil testing, fact sheets on various crops, and nutritional education. Kirby has a school gardening curriculum available on request.

Planting the seed is only the first step in successful gardening; for constant care and cultivation of the community gardens she’s seeded, Kirby relies on local community members who step up and nurture the gardens with their own energy – and character.

For instance, at the City-County community garden, “foster grandfather” Floyd Jameson coaxes three crops a year from an acre and a half across from Parker Elementary school.

Jameson sees the crops from planting right on through to harvest time, when he welcomes the entire community to come and pick.

Just as a single garden contains a variety of crops, each with its own particular preferences and requirements, the community gardens in the food bank’s network have sprung up from a diverse collection of locations, backgrounds, and needs.

Neighborhood groups, schools, and churches are some of the many entities that have started community gardens. One of the earliest community gardens in Oklahoma City, at Selecman First United Methodist Church at Independence Avenue and SW 41st, has individual plots alongside the community ones.

Anyone can get a plot, with the produce going to the needy in the congregation and the local community, including low-income and elderly residents.

Almost all the plants in Selecman’s garden are transplants started at the food bank. It is also one of the food bank’s “tractor gardens,” tilled at the beginning of each season courtesy of the food bank’s tractor.

Over in the Westlawn neighborhood, one of the city’s newest community gardens serves the needs of the residents of the Pershing Center as they transition out of homelessness.

As well as going to other members of the local community, produce from the garden complements food bank provisions to help feed the Pershing Center’s residents.

For some who are completing drug rehabilitation, the vitamins and nutrients in the fresh produce are particularly important for the role they play in the recovery process.

The food bank supplies seeds, plants, and the tractor for the garden, which, says Kirby, is helping the area come together as a neighborhood.

Plans are in the works for fencing, and an edible-landscape border, as well as a hoop house for season extension.
At the Central Park Community Garden, at NW 31st and Shartel, Allan Parlier began with a front-yard garden, and eventually got city permission to expand to four additional lots for a community garden.

Some of the lots had chlordane contamination. After some research, Parlier combined a bioremediation product from an Arkansas firm with several years’ cropping of barley to remove the pollutant from the soil.

In the meantime, the gardens had drawn people out of their houses, and the area’s crime rate had dropped. A project intended to get people to grow more of their own food thus ended up increasing other forms of security than just the food kind; the gardens’ positive effects cascaded into greater safety and neighborliness as well.
Another food bank community garden thrives at the Boys’ & Girls’ Club Community Center, at NW 36th and Military Avenue, where summertime finds 175 kids using the garden to learn about nutrition and grow food – while having fun in the process.

The Boys’ Club is also one of the sites for a program called Kids’ Café, an after-school program providing kids with healthy snacks as well as mentoring and nutrition education.There are about twenty Kids Café’s in Oklahoma.

As the food bank’s community gardening program continues to grow, Kirby hopes to expand the amount of outreach and support that it provides to community gardens in outlying rural areas of the state.
Given the food bank’s growing reputation as a source of know-how and tools for community gardening, such hopes seem well grounded.