Quote:
Originally Posted by jubguy3
I absolutely love what wasatch community gardens does and what they represent, but I feel like they need to branch out into aquiring small parcels and spreading gardens throughout the city. If people know they can have a space to go and grow vegetables and work with earth, they might be less apprehensive about moving into dense housing. But that works better when gardens are just a short walk away, and I don't know if making a larger campus really does more than creating a new one.
Anyways, it's planting season. My entire tiny yalecrest lot is filled to the brim with planter boxes :-) Xeriscaping in the front w/ tomatoes and almost the entire back lot is a fruit and veggie garden. I really wish people took advantage of the space that they would fill with unused grass to make something productive and valuable - and damn delicious. It's a shame that so much space is available in SLC for gardening, yet people just put down turf. I would much rather tend to my tomatoes than mow a lawn. It really is fairly easy, a great habit to get into, and it provides you with incredibly low cost, low-carbon, local, organic delicious produce. I think wasatch should start advocating for people to use the space they have more productively, and making a wide range of small campuses that dot the city for those who can't. But I would spend the money to aquire land from teardowns throughout the city and build gardens that way, as opposed to making a fancy campus.
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You sound like a man of my own heart! The main reason I bought a single family home instead of a townhome (my wife has different reasons) is because I love growing plants and want to grow as much of my own food as possible. Lawns are a terrible waste of resources and often a source of pollution. If you look into the history of lawns, the entire point of them is ostentation; they existed to prove how wealthy an individual was. A small piece of grass to picnic on is a nice thing, and sports fields and such seem reasonable, but every home being surrounded by lawn really is a horrible waste of space and potential production. Suburbia has its problems, to be sure, but since so much of it exists right now anyway, at least it could be productive space instead of the mostly wasted space that it currently is. I've only been in my home for one season, but am taking out lawn and replacing it with food production as I go. It's super rewarding.
I should also note that Wasatch Community Gardens does have small plots scattered throughout the city.
https://wasatchgardens.org/community-gardens/find-a-community-garden
And they are often looking to expand to new plots; however, they don't have the resources to develop and manage all the plots and have to have volunteers sign up and agree to help. I guess I can understand their desire to have a flagship campus as well, but having small plots close to individuals in high density housing does seem like the best use of resources overall.
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