Working in the community garden at La Tercera Park. Photo by Terry Hankins.
Community Gardens are places where people come together to work, play, learn, and grow their own food together, at almost no cost. Petaluma Bounty’s community gardens cultivate healthy food, healthy families, and a healthier community.
Community gardens have been around for a long time (probably as long as humans have been growing food). In this country, community gardening has been growing steadily for decades, with interest really picking up over the past few years as more and more folks learn first hand about the many benefits that community gardens bring.
Validating this personal experience, ample research has demonstrated the many positive effects that plants and gardening have on human health and wellbeing, as well as on the neighborhoods, the environment and the local economies where community gardens are growing. Community gardens help to beautify and strengthen neighborhoods, stimulate multi-generational and multi-cultural interaction, conserve local resources, and also provide bountiful opportunities for recreation, exercise, therapy, and education.
Finally, community gardens are places for learning. Petaluma Bounty helps to coordinates workshops on gardening and related topics to help home gardeners and community gardeners get the most out of their gardens.
For us at Petaluma Bounty, community gardens represent one of the best ways to make fresh, healthy food available and affordable to low-income earning individuals and families. And they can continue to do this for years and years, at very little cost. Petaluma has facilitated the start-up of 5 new community gardens in Petaluma so far, with two new gardens in works for 2010.
If you would like to help create new community gardens in Petaluma or Southern Sonoma County, please click here to let us know. Of course, creating new gardens also takes money and materials, so financial donations are also always welcome!
