CGC volunteers help kick off Good Cause Gardening season | Bread & Butter

If I've said it once, I'll say it a million more times:

"Any way you slice it; homegrown veggies are a good thing."

The biggest trend in food now is to buy locally grown produce or to grow your own but as fresh produce prices have continued to climb this isn’t always an option for area low-income families.

One Cincinnati non-profit however has made it their mission to enable local urban families with the green space, tools and the education to mix it up (garden soil that is) at local neighborhood plots and cultivate their own fresh and healthy food.

The residents in the communities surrounding the Civic Garden Center’s Community Gardens in Cincinnati are soon to be enjoying their own bountiful crop, as the CGC kicked off the gardening season with its annual garden cleanup Saturday, May 16. Local volunteers turned out – despite rainy weather – to weed, seed, mulch and plant the community garden plots, scattered around urban Cincinnati, back into shape for the growing season.

The Civic Garden Center has been a horticultural resource in Cincinnati since it’s founding in 1942 and describes its mission as to enrich “lives through education, community beautification and environmental stewardship.” The CGC offers an array of classes on everything from flower arranging to veggie garden growing and is home to the Hoffman Library that houses over 2,500 gardening reference books.

“I think that it’s great (what the CGC does),” said volunteer Cindy Ellsworth, 41, of Fort Thomas, Ky., with her two children in tow at the Over the Rhine People’s Garden. “They go into these urban areas where there is not a lot of opportunity to experience greenery, green spaces and gardening and put in these community garden plots.”

Now in its 67th year, the CGC’s annual cleanup marked the renewal of their cornerstone Neighborhood Gardens Program. The program, first established in 1981, was founded to create green space where there wasn’t previously any and give residents in low-to-moderate income neighborhoods an outlet for gardening, growing their own healthy food and to help foster a stronger sense of community.

As of 2008, the program has created more than 40 urban vegetable gardens on previously vacant lots throughout the city which are maintained by more than 650 gardeners, yielded more than 14,000 pounds of food and whose community outreach program touched more than 2,000 community residents.

Not to mention, of that 14,000 pounds of food grown just last year, more than 1,500 pounds of it was donated to local food pantries, senior citizens and area families in need.

The CGC hopes to continue to expand the number of Community Garden locations and has created a Community Garden training course through which volunteers, such as John Hemmerle, 24, of Clifton, can learn how to go about starting gardens in their own communities.

“You learn how to set up a community garden and all the intricacies that go along with how to get one off the ground,” said Hemmerle, who is currently working to gain approval to start one on the property of Good Samaritan Hospital in Clifton. The program teaches everyday garden enthusiasts just like you and me how to go about securing a garden site, recruit neighborhood gardeners, as well as the organizational structures and the bylaws and the guidelines that go along with it.

The Community Gardens program creates an environment conducive to environmental education and operates on – as well as teaches – organic gardening practices to the residents that maintain and harvest from the community plots.

“Food (and where it comes from) is an important issue; if you’re growing it here it doesn’t mean it’s getting transported all the way from Iowa,” said volunteer Luanne Diffin, 58, of Montgomery, who came to help as a member of Crossroads Church and their annual ‘Go Cincinnati’ day of service. “Here, it’s basically free and it’s fresh.”