Community Garden Plots at the Senior Garden in Auburn, CA
A healthy community garden that is able to adapt and pursue their goals in a sustainable way can be, and are, driving forces for health in the communities and landscapes they serve. And yet, the Placer Resource Conservation District, an organization dedicated to helping people help the land for the purposes of nurturing the land toward health and productivity, knew little about the community gardening activity occurring in Placer County; who they are, how they operate, and what they do. We wanted to find out!
Thanks to an Urban Ag and Community Initiative Grant made available by the National Association of Conservation Districts (NACD) and the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), for nearly a year, we set out to learn what we could about Placer County’s community gardens. In total we met or talked with 14 of the 17 known community gardens in Placer County which included hours of community garden exploration and touring, meetings with community garden leaders, walking the community garden grounds, touching the soil, hearing stories, and an online survey conducted to collect and review the information gathered. In the end, we gathered only some of what we learned and compiled it into the 2021 Placer County Community Gardens Review.
Because a document for community gardens like this, to our knowledge, did not exist for Placer County, our main purpose for putting together this review was simply to hear community garden leaders, discover what they are up to, and share what we learned with the general public. The perspectives we chose to look through were operational, organizational, and relational in nature. Meaning, we wondered how community gardens relate to those around them, how they were organized, and what they did to function and achieve their goals.
For questions or comments regarding community gardens or this review, please contact:
-
Andrew Justus-Fritz
Community & Conservation Director