Yeah, first of all, congratulations on all three. It's really good stuff. Secondly, Diane,
how did you arrive at the point where the community in Miss Valley said, hey, we want
this? They wanted to, obviously, do a good job of that. How did you, why did they say
we're going to support this? Honestly, I think, well, this is how it happened. It was Christmas,
we had stretched our budget for the grant another six months and I, you know, we took
off for the holidays and I came back in January and I looked across the table and said, so
am I still going to get paid to do this? And basically, over that break, the director of
Parks and Recreation and the town manager were both of the opinion that they had the
money and that this is what we needed to do. So, to some extent, our small little town
happened to have the right people in the right places of power to allow it to happen. And
I think they made a really wise decision on a number of levels, both personal but also
from a community standpoint. I mean, we have such buy-in for our program.
Just please. Where is the Lord's acre? It's in Fairview, which is about 10 or 15 minutes
after that. You are a 501c3? 501c3? Awesome. I have the health department as my fiscal
agent. You're un-rulling. Yes. You can un-rull your churches as well. Yes. Right. And you
said, Adam. Yes. That you supply tools, equipment, and fertilizer. Yeah. Do you have strict
adherence or gui? Both the guards I work with are grown using organic cultural methods
and we rely on the certified USDA organic as a guide, but not the end all be all of
what it defines natural. But no seven, no 3D, no round up. No seven. No seven. No. Miracle
grow is not a miracle, folks. It is not. It is not a miracle. It is. It destroys soil
in the long term.
One of the things I would like to put into essentials
is I recommend when you're starting to guard,
especially if you're gonna have children around,
guard using organic methods.
Start there, do the best you can.
I just wanted to add to, not take away from questions,
but what Diana said about the Black Mountain Bot,
you know, when they looked at her and they were like,
she made them want that, or that community did.
I think it's the same with churches.
I've heard of quite a few churches
where you have these boards and they're like,
no, we need parking, I don't want to do that.
All these reasons, once the garden's there
and it's beautiful and it's successful
and the community buys in,
like people, that all goes away.
It usually all goes away.
I have one more question for you.
Where does, I know that y'all supply the three table.
Do you supply the local service kitchen also?
We supply our local food pantry,
which is a quarter mile away.
We supply our local welcome table,
which is a quarter mile away.
And then we've had buy-in from a community member
who said, I'm going to do something about this.
She wants to take all the excess
and make it distribute locally.
So no soup kitchen in your area, is that?
Well, we have what's called a welcome table,
which I think is better than a soup kitchen,
because it's a concept that brings everybody together.
You pay what you can if you can.
And so other than a soup kitchen, you're bringing,
again, you're not separating people,
you're bringing them together.
We call it the church of food.
How do you get to use your food from the garden's in?
The kitchen, because where I'm at,
we have what's called a farm cafe.
And they have guidelines about food
in which they can take it,
because we've got one fellow who donates feed,
but he cannot give it to him
because it's not been inspected by meat inspectors.
I think if no one, if you're not selling it,
that's not true.
They do it.
Feed all regardless of means, you pay what you can.
Yeah.
I was wondering how that would work.
I think you can get through some of those regulations,
and you definitely want to talk with agents
in your community.
But as long as you're not selling,
if you offer the food with a sliding scale donation,
okay, no, you're not selling produce,
so you don't fall under some of those regulations.
No, no, you shouldn't.
I'll try.
Yeah, that's the same for us too.
We donate to a welcome table and to a Christian ministry.
That's right.
There's no inspection or anything like that.
Good question, Erin.
We haven't started an official one yet,
but what you talk about is to explain plant, plot, adoption,
and when you have a community garden,
is part of it where the community works through it
and people have their individuals.
Again, there are so many models,
and all of them, it depends on your own community
and how it develops, what's going to be most successful.
In my experience, the Silver Community Garden initial,
before I joined it, started as one large garden.
Where all the food was grown collectively
by all the people working and donated 100%.
In the springtime, it was great,
because people were cooped up with cabin fever
and spring fever, and that's a wacko combination.
So they came out in droves, and all the work was getting done.
When it got hot and buggy in the summer, I went swimming.
I don't know what I was talking about.
I think that's a really tough model, personally.
And so we have a number, we have a couple of models
represented at the community garden.
And here's one I would recommend, personally,
if you want to grow forgiving,
to be able to have people from your community
to be able to grow for themselves.
So in Black Mountain, similar to here,
forested land, hilly land,
not possible for families to grow at home.
We rent plots, they're 400 square feet,
and they're very affordable.
There's $35 for the entire from March through October.
And in each of those plots,
those family members donates the first five feet
of their row, it's equivalent to 10%.
So going to that tradition of tithing
10% of your income, they provide 10% of their produce.
And I provide, I do a crop rotation every year,
so you're never growing the same thing on the plot,
and we grow between two and three crops.
On that five, it's essentially 30 square feet.
And it's five by six, yeah.
So I provide, so B row grows potatoes this year,
C row grows lettuce, and A row grows broccoli,
and then in the summertime,
they grow squash beans and something else.
And then in the fall, they all grow,
you know, maybe a cover crop or a green.
Every year, that has produced 1,000 pounds of produce.
I do very little for that.
So again, if you're looking at something
that's only gonna be a garden that's charging you,
that's costing you like $500 or $600 to run a year,
this requires very little management,
it has incredible results.
So you tell them what they're gonna grow
in the first five feet?
Yeah, and here's why.
Because a distribution center,
like a soup kitchen or a welcome table
or someone who's giving food from a food pantry,
they don't want five pounds of tomatoes
and two pounds of cucumber and 13 pounds of lettuce.
They want a crop that they can actually get
to more than 30 people.
So each row grows the same thing.
It also makes it convenient for volunteers
because I have pretty consistent volunteers,
but sometimes I have young kids
or kids who've never been there before
and they're only gonna come once.
I can reliably tell them, walk down this row
and harvest the first five feet on the right,
all the way down that row.
Walk down this row and harvest the first five feet
on the left.
Now my gardeners are safe,
none of their food is ever taken from
and we get a good harvest that way.
And it's teaching, a big mission of the community garden
is education.
And so I provide instructions, I laminate instructions
and I put them up in the shed for each row
and it gives them different planting styles and methods
so they can experiment and they can see what works
and what doesn't.
And they can see that the person next to them
did it in this method and they did it in this method
and who got the better yield.
And again, there's so many different models.
Yeah, I think that's something like we're trying to,
this is the beginning of the inception of us,
all these gardens that give coming together
and trying to create something that we can give
and this is the first thing we've given is talks.
But we wanna create something we can hand out
that can really explain to you all the different models.
Our model is everyone comes and works one big plot
and we give it all away.
That's not that feasible for a lot of places.
It is feasible for some places.
But I think we must have 10 different models
among us, if not more.
And so it'll be great once we get that written down
for you guys and anyone else to be able to look at that
and say, well, that works for me,
but that doesn't work for me.
So I'm gonna go over here and that works for me
and try different pieces.
Has harvesting by non-growth been a problem for you?
For me, you're looking at me and I will answer you, yes.
Yes, yes.
Yes, I have a great story.
All garden, yeah, all garden works by non-garden.
But I think just to speak to that
and maybe we'll speak to that in the second part
is that whole thing of letting go.
Letting go being flexible.
We all three are gonna, could tell you stories of like,
ooh, we're gonna go here.
In the end of the process and the education,
it's not just about getting food.
So I have these two Mississippi farm boys
who came out to the community garden last summer
and they looked like they knew what they were doing.
They talked like they knew what they were doing.
I said, great, go harvest the tomatoes.
Here's a wheelbarrow.
And I had 20 kids and I was supervising on my own,
so I was running all over the place,
handing out jobs, supervising,
and I get back to them about 20 minutes later in the cycle.
And they have a wheelbarrow full of the biggest green tomatoes.
It's August, and I take a deep breath
and I think of something instructive and kind
and supportive to say to these boys,
and I said, go take a break.
Do you know that you're supposed to pick the red ones?
And the boys paused and they looked at me and they,
and I said, why did you pick these?
They looked at me and they said, well, they were so big.
So at that point, you know, you do the letting go,
and that's a beautiful part,
getting back to the whole transformation
and leading on into our next talk
of the sustainability of a community garden.
That's right.
So many lessons every year, every day,
in a garden lessons for myself.
We're the ones that are growing.
I've grown so much through that.
