Is Your Family Part of the 37%?

I swung by Wills Park in Alpharetta Saturday on my way home from my seven-week Fundamentals of Organic Farming class at Cane Creek Farm in Cumming. Mike, who writes Sustainable Alpharetta, is in my class and he was telling me about the brand new Alpharetta Community Garden. There will be about 32 plots, for rent for $50 a piece per year. They apparently sold out in something like four days (Mike snagged one). The first two, which are already built (see photo), are "enabling beds," which means they are designed specifically for seniors or those with mobility limitations. The rest will be built Saturday, April 25, as part of Comcast Cares Day.

Comcast Cares Day is the annual event when Comcast employees volunteer in about thirteen different northern Georgia communities in the morning and then come together for a celebration in the afternoon. This year, the employees are building gardens, with the help of Farmer D. The celebration will be at our very own Dunwoody Nature Center from 1-4 PM April 25. In addition to Farmer D (who has a show on the Mother Nature Network), other "talent" from the network will be there, plus various other organizations with eco-things to demonstrate, a concert, some food samples, and more. More details will follow shortly. I just wanted you to have a feel for the community gardening impact that will happen in our region in the next two weeks, and the incredible opportunity we have to host such a positive event at our showcase nature center.

Speaking of gardening:

37 percent of all households (about 43 million families) plan to grow vegetables, fruit, berries or herbs in 2009, according to the National Gardening Asssociation. This is up 19% from 2008. If that statistic is right, that means more than one out of every three homes will have a garden. That means my neighborhood should have about 40 food gardens. I know of three. What about your neighborhood? What neighborhood in Dunwoody has the highest number of food gardens?

I admit this is a hard number to nail since most people plant their veggies in the back, and let's face it, we don't know our neighbors, as a society, the way we used to. (That's one of the reasons, by the way, that I planted one of my beds around my mailbox.)

If you have a food garden, please consider joining the Dunwoody Food Gardeners Group on the Dunwoody Sustainability social marketing site. The more connected we are, the more we can grow (literally and figuratively) as a sustainable community.