It’s been a busy month in the LPH Community Gardens program. We’ve planted in community garden spaces and home gardens, hired teen garden apprentices, kicked off weekly workdays, and hosted a site visit with Faye from Grow Appalachia. With all this activity, we wanted to share some wins—and some challenges—from the month.

Wins

  • We officially have more home garden participants this season than we had anticipated.
  • All four of our teen garden apprentices have been hired for the summer.
  • We are seeing real leadership among home garden participants. Those with prior garden experience are encouraging our newer gardeners.
  • We have been able to offer home garden participants more customized tools and supplies to meet their needs, instead of everyone getting the same distribution of items.
  • One of our most meticulous neighbors emailed to tell us how good the community gardens look (see also, our challenges).

Challenges

  • We are struggling to maintain accessible community gardens while protecting what we’ve built with neighbors. Recently, we had to re-lock the gate in one garden after a bored kid uprooted most of our well-established potato plants.
  • Someone left trash outside of a community garden, resulting in an unfortunate “litter patrol” fine from the city (ironically, on the same day we received the complimentary email from our neighbor).
  • We need to find ways to get all of our home garden participants excited about harvest logs. Perhaps, our more highly engaged gardeners can help?

Do you have a recent garden program win or challenge to share? Post them in the comments!