Feed The Hungry

Catholic Community Gardens

Feed the Hungry - Our Community Garden - Community Garden Resources - French Intensive Gardening - Hay Bale Gardens

Feed the Hungry Whether you decide to plant an extra row for the hungry, or start a community garden, this is an action that brings faith into action in a very real way.

Blaze harvests zucchini squash in our community garden to feed the poor.

Join other members of your parish or apostolate to start a community garden. Many seed and garden companies will make a donation at the end of the season.

We especially like Seeds of Change which offers a wide variety of open pollinated, organic seed for a small shipping fee.

Be sure to visit the Organic Seed Alliance as well all of the other large seed companies who will usually donate just for asking.

Get your parish or group involved with Plant a Row for the Hungry sponsored by the Garden Writers Association. Not only will they provide helpful information and resources, but you'll have a full cadre of writers to publicize your project!

About 12 years ago we started a community garden in the middle of our street!

Most of the lots in our community are quite small, so we brought together a group of neighbors, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and asked the city to plow up plots in the middle of the grassy malls.

Our pastor, Fr. Tom, came to bless the garden, and the usual group of politicians showed up for a photo op.

Father Tom Blesses The Garden

The American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) is your first stop for community gardening. You'll probably spend a lot of time at their site because there is so much information to look through, so bookmark it for later on. The Association recognizes that community gardening improves the quality of life for people by providing a catalyst for neighborhood and community development, stimulating social interaction, encouraging self-reliance, beautifying neighborhoods, producing nutritious food, reducing family food budgets, conserving resources and creating opportunities for recreation, exercise, therapy and education.

iVillage Community Garden Forum - Meet other gardeners, share ideas and inspiration.

The Food Security Center explores the nature of poverty and hunger and how community gardens can make a difference.

Green Guerillas - We met up with this group in the 1970s when we started a garden in the East Village of NYC in response to urban squalor and hunger. They've come a long way and anyone in an urban area will do well to spend some time at this website.

Guerilla Gardening - Lots of inspiration here. Another great website where you're likely to get lost for a while.

The American Horticultural Therapy Association - If you have any doubts about the benefits of gardening, they will be erased as you look through this site.

Seeds of Change Donation Program

Our efforts won awards on a national level including the American Community Garden Award. We survived road repair - except for the traffic circle once full of lilies and sunflowers - and it even survived the boys growing up and finding other interests.

The garden was the focal point for my degree in sociology centering on community cohesion and crime reduction.

Sadly, after ten years of providing happiness to many, it did not survive a change in the local government administration.  We came home one day to find the rose trellis knocked down, the garden beds plowed under and all the perennials and heirloom herbs were lost forever. Not an unusual scenario for community gardens in public spaces.

The garden lives on in the hearts who worked in it, visited it, and reaped its benefits.

Catholic Charities in Ann Arbor, Michigan

If you're growing food - for yourself or others - you probably won't have a lot of land. We've found several techniques to be useful. Here are two: French Intensive Gardening and Hay Bale Gardening.

End Times Report - A preparedness website from an old  friend, Miles Stair, who includes many excellent tips for stealth gardening.

Travis Beck and Martin F. Quigley, Department of Horticulture and Crop Science, The Ohio State University

French intensive organic gardening offers a means to produce large quantities of fresh vegetables in a small area without the use of synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. It is an excellent gardening method for city dwellers who have limited yard space and who do not wish to expose themselves, their children, or their pets to potentially dangerous chemicals. It is also well-suited to small market garden operations.

Intensive organic gardening has its roots in the French market gardens of the 19th century. Parisian gardeners at this time were able to grow over 100 pounds of produce annually for every person in the city. They achieved this remarkable productivity through the use of raised beds (up to 18 inches in height) built with horse manure, which was abundant at the time, close plant spacing, and the use of glass cloches to allow for growth even in the winter.

These techniques were brought to the United States by Alan Chadwick in the 1930s, and have continued to be refined and promoted by John Jeavons. Simultaneously, J. I. Rodale began demonstrating organic practices on his Pennsylvania farm. Rodale emphasized the creation of healthy soil through the use of organic amendments. The Rodale Institute now promotes the same philosophy of soil management for small gardens as well as farms, and Rodale Press has published much literature on organic gardening.

Intensive Organic Gardening Practices

A key element in intensive organic gardens is the raised bed (Figure 1). These beds are made of loose rich soil that provides excellent growing conditions for most vegetables. They should be narrow enough that a person standing on the path can reach comfortably to the middle of the bed. Raised beds can be permanently defined by landscape timbers (the use of non-treated lumber is recommended), boards, bricks, or any number of other materials. They may also simply be shaped out of the soil. The latter practice makes it easier to build a curved bed shape which increases the relative growing area. The soil in a raised bed is typically turned and amended at the beginning of each growing season. This can be done with a rototiller, by hand, or through the process of double-digging.

Double-digging involves loosening the soil to a substantial depth, and amending the top layer. The steps in double-digging are as follows:

1. Spread a layer of compost and other soil amendments on the surface of the area to be dug.
2. Using a spade or short-handled shovel, remove a trench of soil approximately one foot deep and one foot wide along the narrow end of the bed.
3. Loosen the soil at the bottom of the trench with the shovel or a spading fork. Avoid mixing soil layers as much as possible.
4. Dig a one foot by one foot trench next to your existing one and place the soil removed on top of the loosened soil in your first trench.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 along the length of the bed.

This process will create a raised bed simply by loosening the soil and incorporating additional organic matter. The bed can then be shaped with a rake to achieve a rounded surface. It is important not to double dig when the soil is too wet, as this will create large clumps. A lightly moist soil is ideal. An initial double dig is quite demanding, but in future years the job becomes easier.

Make use of those rounded edges. Also, consider intercropping. Carrots, for instance, can be planted in the spaces between lettuce. The lettuce will shade the soil and keep it moist, allowing for easier germination of the carrot seedlings. Then, when the lettuce is harvested for the season, the carrots will grow up and fill the space. Through intercropping, two or more crops can grow in the same area of bed in a single season.

To maintain the fertility of the soil, intensive organic gardeners use crop rotation, cover cropping, and compost. Crop rotation means alternating plantings each year between heavy feeders (most vegetable crops), soil-building crops (such as nitrogen-fixing legumes) and light feeders (most root crops). More elaborate rotation schemes are possible. Cover crops are soil-building crops that are not harvested, but are composted or tilled back into the soil. They can be part of a crop rotation, or can be used over winter to prevent soil erosion and improve fertility.

Read more at

Ohio State Extension

Each autumn our city holds a Fall Festival featuring a pumpkin patch nestled in a closed in area created by hundreds of hay bales. When the festival is over, residents can take home the hay bales. Soon after the autumn season is over, we find them at the curb ready to be picked up by the garbage trucks. What a waste!

We've taken bales apart and used the "books" of hay as a weed blocking foundation for garden paths, Their natural look is charming in an informal garden, keeping mud from your feet. You can add stepping stones or colored bark for color.

If you live in an urban setting or want to convert a concrete covered area into a garden without the trouble of breaking it up - think about hay bales.

Give a no-dig raised bed garden a jump start by outlining the area with hay bales.  Add garden waste to the center to build up layers as the years go by -- and when you get to the point where it's hard to bend over, you won't have to worry. A terrific idea for a garden serving senior citizens or the physically challenged.

Visit Nichols Garden Nursery for complete instructions on how to grow. While the photo above shows the start of a garden, imagine it covered with lush flowering herbs.

A great idea for stealth gardening!

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