A community that gardens together grows together. Literally! There are gardeners who may grow a specific crop that barter with other gardeners who are growing something different. Sharing the harvest from their garden with neighbors, friends, or family and building a bond of pride. Learning a life skill and being able to know where your food comes from, is valuable to not only those who participate, but for those who consume it too! But there can be challenges!

In more urban communities, space and soil are some of the biggest barriers when it comes to growing your own food. But with the constraints of limited space, also come solutions like vertical gardening, container gardening, or rooftop gardening. With compacted and potentially contaminated soils, it can make it difficult to have an in-ground garden in urban spaces, but just like the limitations on space, there are solutions for poor soil quality too! Like raised beds or container gardens. These are not the only barriers or challenges of growing your own food in urban spaces. Land access is a major concern. Most people rent or live so close together that sun exposer makes it hard to grow certain sun loving crops. In this way, urban living differs from rural areas.

Urban living sometimes come with limited space, neighbor disputes, natural resource competition, regulations and restrictions. At first glance, these may be the only barriers. But, the greater impediment are a series of negative assumptions and limiting beliefs embedded in the public’s mind about home food production when working with urban dwellers. It takes time to empower people with solutions to these problems. It takes knowledge on how to recognize and navigate through these barriers in order for more people in urban spaces to have access to local healthy food. Taking away those false assumptions and replacing them with permanent capabilities and life skills is our goal in hopes of building stronger local growing communities here in Northern Kentucky.