Hi Don,
I live in the TriCities area of NE TN, that Mike McG so graciously praised in
a recent post. (Hi Mike! We loved your talk on composting!) Anyway, I wanted to
start a garden in downtown Johnson City, so I asked around and found that I had
a friend that knew one of our city commissioners. She introduced us, and the
commissioner liked the idea, so last January we held a meeting asking anyone
having a remote interest in such a garden to attend. The director of one of the
city parks came, and offered use of some unused park land for the garden. It
was exactly in the area I had hoped to garden so I didn't 'shop around' any
further, even though there were offers from all segments of the city- ie; the
jail, the county farm, alternative school, etc.
Next came preparing the soil. The city delivered several loads of topsoil and
compost and tilled it in, free of charge. Then water: because of it's easy
access, the city also agreed to 'tap in' to an existing water line and let's us
have the water for free. Because this garden is in a park that surrounds a
community center, there's easy access as well to restrooms and shade canopies.
The county extension office had been given all of the leftover seeds from
Kmart's in this area, and were offering them free to organizations like ours,
so we got our seeds there. The above mentioned city commissioner gave a
personal donation of $500 and her good friend did too. My church gave $500, so
with the $1500, I was able to purchase plants, tools and fencing to go around
the approx 40'x65' space. A local fence company was asked to donate their time
to erect the fence, which they did. Last but not least, the city also donated a
large tool shed for us, but unfortunately
decided it needed to be behind the community center which is NOT easily
reached by the garden. That's another issue for another day... We still have
$500 and hope to use it this winter to purchase materials to make raised beds.
So, in this case, we were 'in business' for $1000. The soil is poor and the
yields were low but the local newspaper did 2 or 3 articles on the garden
during the summer, with color pics, etc and that exposure helped the gardener's
lagging spirits too- haha We now have a small waiting list for the 10 plots
that are in the garden.
Hope this helps Don. I can't imagine even if we had had to pay for water tap
fees and tilling and labor for installing the fence, that we would've spent
anywhere near $10K on this garden. But I'd sure like to try. haha
Sam Jones
A garden, where one may enter in and forget the whole world,
cannot be made in a week, nor a month, nor a year; it must
be planned for, waited for and loved into being.
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