Community Garden Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Faith Based Community Garden Helping Those In Need

The First Lutheran Community Garden is located on a small lot on the corner of 19th Street and Liberty Street in Parkersburg. The property used to be an apartment building, but when it was torn down, the church decided to purchase the land and start a garden. The mission of the garden is to make produce available to those who may struggle getting it otherwise.

It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, and with an hour to go until the free produce stand opens, people are arriving from all directions and from various neighborhoods in Parkersburg. The crowds are waiting for the free produce stand to open. Patricia Harman is one of the volunteers. She’s covered in dirt from working in the garden, and she has to shout over the growing crowds of people to be heard.

“I live alone so it’s really nice ‘cause I can just take one or two tomatoes and a mess of beans. So it makes it convenient for me,” community member Jane Couch said.

Tomato Plants Ransacked

When the church first started this garden in 2012, members of the community were free to go into the garden and pick the vegetables whenever they wanted. But about a month ago, the volunteers decided too many people had been ransacking the garden in the middle of the night for tomatoes. The volunteers decided to lock the gates and give out free produce at designated times.

Recent theft has caused the church to lock the garden’s gates.

Another one of the main garden volunteers is church member Don Ery.

“From out at the other garden they have squash and cucumbers, and a lot of beans,” he said.

Match Made in Heaven

Public demand for fresh food began to get so high that volunteers started thinking about expanding to another space, explains Bob Friend, another volunteer.

“Last year, Don and I talked about it and we decided to try to have another garden because we found that the need here was much greater than we could provide with the small garden we had here.”

Bob and Don were then presented with the perfect opportunity to expand when a woman offered up her garden. Carlina Titus owns a piece a lot across town. She says she offered up her land because she was impressed with what the First Lutheran Church had done to build their first community garden.

“I would see them working there when I went to work in the morning and when I came home in the evening,” she said.

Carlina’s husband has early stages of Alzheimer’s, and their large garden was becoming too much for them to take care of.

Bob Friend tends to the church’s second garden.

“So one day I just stopped and asked them because my husband said, ‘I’m going to have to let half of it grow over ‘cause I can’t use it,’ and I thought, ‘No not after it’s been tilled and used and everything else. That would be a shame.’”

Carlina and her husband’s garden is located just north of the Parkersburg city limits next to a busy two lane highway. It’s almost twice the size of the garden on 19th Street. Just this year, they’ve given away over 400 pounds of produce to the community.

Fresh Produce in High Demand

The Parkersburg free produce stand still runs out of food most days that it’s open, but the volunteers are now able to give away a lot more produce with the addition of Carlina’s garden.

“We picked cucumbers yesterday. There’s a whole row of cucumbers out through here and this is all squash,” Bob said.

Bob and I traveled back to the garden at the First Lutheran Church, where Patricia was beginning to stock the shelves of the produce stand. She filled the shelves with large ripe tomatoes, eggplants, green and yellow peppers, carrots and plastic bags filled with fresh green beans.

Produce doesn’t last long once it’s put in the stand.

Dexter Cunningham is waiting in line for vegetables. He says not only does he benefit from the garden, but his sister and her children do too. He gets them produce from the stand for them to pick up later.

“When it’s hot and you’ve got kids it’s hard to get out of the house. So I usually just get it and they come in on the weekends and get it from the house,” he said.

It’s a bit of extra work to hand food out personally, rather than just leaving the garden open for people to pick food on their own. But the volunteers who help run this garden, like Patricia Harman, say it’s worth the time to know that people in need are getting nutritious food that they wouldn’t get otherwise.

“Well, the lady who said ‘I haven’t had fresh vegetables in years because they’re too expensive’. So that was really, really nice that we could give her fresh vegetables,” she said.

Boy Scout Honors Friend with Community Garden Project

It’s November, and the growing season is over for most vegetables. But even with the frosts and the shorter days, not everyone has retreated indoors. 17-year-old Connor Haynes is spending two months worth of Saturdays building a shed and rain barrels in a community garden in Charleston. Connor is working on his Eagle Scout badge, and he’s also using the project to honor his friend.

This community garden is located along Washington Street East next to Dollar General- the only store in the East End neighborhood where people can buy groceries, although there isn’t really very much food available there.

Connor Haynes and his family live outside of town, but he wanted to volunteer in this garden because there are so many people hoping to see it grow.

“It’s important to have locally grown food around. It’s a nice place. It’s a good location. There’s a bunch of gardens that people rent out. And can plant whatever they want and can grow vegetable gardens.”

Gardener Scott McMillian and city councilwoman Kasey Russell. Russell has been the main orchestrator of the East End Community Garden.

The East End Community garden has about 20 garden plots that it rents for $30 a year. They have a scholarship fund to help those in need use a garden plot for free. There is also a shared community plot, where anyone can take fruits and vegetables. This garden is located along a busy arterial street, in what had previously been a vacant lot.

Connor has been weeding some of the garden plots and building a tool shed. He’s also putting four rail barrels for people to use to water their plants.

To help him, Connor recruited a few boys from his scout troop, as well as friends from school. Their work began in October and will continue until the end of November.

In the past two years, many hands have worked to develop this space into a well used garden. Not only does it provide fresh food for people, one of the plot owners Mark Wolfe says this space also provides a visual reminder that food can grow right in your own backyard.

“So many people are shocked to find that people are planting and growing right in the middle of a city. And you get so many people that are neighbors coming over and saying they remember growing tomatoes with their grandmother.”

The East End Community Garden Project is a collaboration between neighborhood volunteers and the city of Charleston. Scott McMillian is one of the many community gardeners who have grown here for for two years.

“We put teams together and in an afternoon we turned an eyesore into something special.”

And though the volunteers have put all this labor into the garden, this lot is technically owned by the Charleston Urban Renewal Authority, or CURA. Jim Edwards, with CURA, says his group purchased this lot when they were developing a new streetscape along Washington St. They needed a place to put a power generator for the new lights, but the rest of the lot was not being used.

“It’s a good interim use of the property, and it’s certainly better that an empty lot that has to be mowed,” said Jim Edwards.

He adds that a new commercial development could eventually be built here in place of this garden.

“Well I say interim because any time you have vacant property on almost an arterial road like Washington St., you want to ultimately see it developed to a more, I guess productive is the right word, use. But this is a good use until something else comes along.”

The future of the garden might be uncertain, but it has never been more popular. Mark Wolfe rents one of the plots and has been one of the main volunteers here since the beginning. “I’m always being asked ‘how do I get a plot?'”

Part of the work that Connor Haynes is doing will help Mark and the other volunteers have more access to water next year. He’s also building a covered benches and tables to give people a place to enjoy the garden or get out of the weather.

Gardeners Scott McMillian and Sarah Cowgill talk with Jim Edwards, with the Charleston Urban Redevelopment Authority

This fall, about the same time that Connor was beginning to plan this community service project, he learned that his friend and mentor Andrew O’ Neil, a fellow Boy Scout, had passed away. The death was an accident, and quite a shock to many within the Boy Scout community in West Virginia. Andrew and Connor had worked worked together at the Buckskin Boy Scout Reservation in Pocahontas County. Andrew was seven years older than Connor.

Steven Haynes helps his son Connor Haynes digging out the concrete foundation for a new shed in the East End Community Garden.

“I’m dedicating this project to my friend Andrew O’ Neil. He died recently. And he helped me a lot getting here, where I am now.”

Without his friend, Connor says he might not be spending his Saturdays at this community garden, and he might not be working towards his Eagle Scout badge. He sees the East End Garden as a community asset that can provide important community resources for years to come.

Dedicating this community service project to his friend, he says, just seemed to fit the kind of person that Andrew was. A person who would appreciate seeing more and more community gardens, like this one, continue to grow.

These Groups are Reforming West Virginia's Food Economy

The phrase “food-desert” might sound like a landscape of sagebrush and armadillos, but it’s really a place where SlimJims, chicken nuggets and Slurpies count as dinner. A food desert can happen anywhere- we’ve all seen them. People who live in a food desert may be surrounded by food—fast food or convenient store hotdogs, instead of fresh, healthy food.

Even in rural West Virginia, where small farms still dot the roadside, fresh food isn’t available to all people. In some places it can take over an hour just to reach the next grocery store. Reawakening some of the old, small farm traditions– and bringing a new local food movement to West Virginia– is the work of five non-profits that were highlighted by the James Beard Foundation. Groups were chosen based on their work to bring healthy, local food to more people.

One of those chosen to be highlighted is the West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition, directed by Elizabeth Spellman.

“We focus on helping people connect with each other so they can educate each other and be stronger together,” said Spellman.

The coalition trains farmers and advocates for statewide policies that help nurture small farmers.

Spellman says that because West Virginia has the highest number of small farms per capita in the country, there is a unique opportunity here to help transform the local food economy.

Children with a YMCA camp helping find harlequin beetles in the West Side Community Garden Project in Charleston

“Yeah, and we’re uniquely positioned to show what a small farm state can do because we don’t really have that many large farms. We’re mostly small farms. And people relying on each other and working together.”

The Food and Farm coalition launched in 2010 under the West Virginia Community Development Hub, but recently the group has grown and is now its own nonprofit. Other groups that work in West Virginia that the James Beard Foundation chose to highlight were the the Collaborative for the 21st Century Appalachia– which hosts the Cast Iron Cook Off each January, the West Virginia University Small Farm Center, The Wild Ramp market in Huntington, and the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which helps preserve heirloom seeds across the south. The organizations were all selected to be part of a guide, which launched yesterday on FoodTank and is meant to help chefs and consumers identify sources of local, healthy food.

Hannah McCune, age 11, helping in the West Side Community Garden Project in Charleston

How Vacant Lots in Charleston Are Transforming Into a School for Farmer-Entrepreneurs

On a sultry summer evening, three women are killing harlequin beetles in an effort to save the greens at the SAGE micro-farm on Rebecca Street that they landscaped themselves.

Last year, Kathy Moore, Jenny Totten and Meg Reishman completed 18 agriculture and business classes through SAGE, which stands for Sustainable Agricultural Entrepreneurs. Kathy says she loves getting to take home an unlimited supply of fresh vegetables each week.

“Oh my goodness, the green zebra tomatoes were absolutely my favorite. They are just absolutely luscious!” says Kathy, who works a day job, like most of the other growers, outside the SAGE micro-farm. She and the other SAGE growers also earn a few hundred dollars apiece at the end of the year based on the group’s produce sales.

The food is grown on Charleston’s West Side, in a high-crime area with many vacant lots. Over the past two years, the SAGE program has transformed two of these lots into working micro-farms.

New this year is the Rebecca St. garden, with its unusual swirling starburst shape. At the center of the beds of squash, kale and tomatoes is a bright circle of sunflowers, zinnias, basil and cilantro. Kathy is surprised that the garden’s design has been so successful.

“I had no idea that it would be so inviting. So, yeah. It’s a really nice design, and people are excited just to come and look at it.”

Rainbow chard and collard greens have been some of SAGE’s best sellers this year

SAGE sells edible flowers to a local restaurant in Charleston called Mission Savvy. The flower and herbs are grown in a circle at the center of the Rebecca Street garden.

The SAGE program teaches growers like Meg Reischman how to make a business plan and how to choose the most profitable types of produce.

“I was having a difficult time sitting down and figuring out what my break even price was, and whether it was worth growing it or not, making a plan,” Meg says.

Many of the students struggle with these questions, says SAGE instructor Dr. Dee Sing-Knights, Assistant Professor of Agricultural Economics with West Virginia University’s extension services. She teaches the SAGE growers how to manage small businesses and how to market their produce. She tells the growers to make sure the public knows that SAGE’s organic produce might cost a little more than supermarket vegetables, which often come from larger, more mechanized farms.

“I always tell them, you have to tell your customers that listen, the reason this costs more is I squashed my bugs by hand!” says Dr. Singh-Knights. The SAGE growers are also learning to educate more potential customers about the value of spending money inside the community, versus sending the money out of state by buying food at a chain store.

Even if the 18 SAGE graduates never become full time farmers, this morning for breakfast they are probably all making food using at least one ingredient they grew themselves.

This year, the group has seen an increase in the sales of produce and flowers at their local Saturday markets, as more customers are enjoying the fruits of their labor, too.

New Urban Garden in Wheeling Designed For the Blind

Wheeling has a new urban garden, and it’s a little out of the ordinary. It’s designed for visually impaired gardeners. Not many like it exist in the state.

Inspiration From Afar

What was an empty lot on Wheeling Island in Ohio County not long ago is now a garden of peppers, flowers, beans, and more. Martin Wach designed and built it. Over the past several years he’s built several urban gardens in the area. Wach has trained mentally disabled people to garden, but even he was befuddled by the idea of creating a garden for the blind. He had to do some research, but he found a few good models.

“In Africa was the perfect example,” Wach said, “in Ghana and the Congo. All of the blind there garden. They have a vegetable garden. So I began to realize that the blind, even though they can’t see, have operational capability. They’ve learned how to compensate.”

Wach is using some of the African gardening techniques here in West Virginia. One device helps the visually impaired know which vegetables are in which beds.

“We put a string with knots in it,” Wach said. “They slide their hands down the string. One knot is this garden, a little bit father is two knots, it’s cabbage; three knots is peppers.”

The Seeing Hand

Teddy Busby and Debbie Hatfield work to pot plants in the fledgling nursery. They plan to sell the plants to pay for garden operations.

The garden for the blind is the latest initiative of the The Seeing Hand Association, a Wheeling-based organization with a mission to help blind and visually impaired people lead fulfilling and independent lives. Executive Director Karen Haught says some of the clients find jobs within the organization.

“We’re always looking for projects and ways to have our employees do things that they enjoy.”

The land for the garden was donated to the group. And now two Seeing Hand employees, Teddy Busby and Debbie Hatfield are spending a couple of hours a week in the back of the garden – a nursery that grows potted plants and flowers.

Teddy: She goes and gets me the plant, and I just put the dirt inside the pot. That’s basically the way we do it all the time. Board: And how many have you done? Teddy: Oh lord, we’ve done over— Debbie: We lost count. Glynis: You lost count? Teddy: I’d say we did over 400 or so, something like that. Debbie: And they’re going to be beautiful. They make a beautiful ground cover.

Busby and Hatfield use their sense of touch to tell the difference between day lilies and weeds.

Other gardening techniques for the visually impaired include wind chimes and herbs with strong fragrance to help navigate the garden, as well as vertical growing, like walls of tomatoes. The Wheeling garden could incorporate those in the future.

Gardening is new for Busby. He said his mom used to garden when he was a kid, but he never caught the gardening bug himself. But he’s getting into it now.

Hatfield does have some gardening experience and she’s happy to be getting her hands dirty again.

“It’s hard work,” she said, “don’t let them fool you that it’s easy—it’s not.”

But she said she likes being outside, and perhaps most importantly, she appreciates the opportunity to serve her community.

Public Service

Right now the plan for the produce:

A large portion will go to the House of the Carpenter, a local charity that distributes food to low income households.
Some will also go to Seeing Hand.
Overflow may be sold in farmers markets.
Plants from the nursery will be sold to pay for garden operations.

The hope is with some volunteer help, and continued support from the community, Wheeling’s garden for the blind should soon be self-sufficient and could even become profitable.

Children Combat Hunger in West Virginia

Tom Toliver has seen people with children who are hungry, searching for food in dumpsters in the alleys of Charleston. And he isn’t the only one. At the Union Mission where Toliver has been donating fresh vegetables, the president and CEO Rex Whiteman says hunger is on the rise throughout the state, and in Appalachia.

“Yes, we see people that are hungry, people that have not eaten for several days, and will come in our doors saying, ‘can you help me?’. And that is overwhelming, in a society and in a world of abundance, that we have people that are literally starving to death. With the mines closing down, and many of them closing in recent months, that’s just created a new wave of hunger and new people that are in the pipeline, asking for help,” Whiteman said.

And these new people mean that new food is needed all the time. Healthy food, like the type of produce Toliver has been growing in his garden. And this week, staff at the YMCA were inspired by Toliver’s vision and brought 22 kids from summer camp to help him harvest vegetables and deliver them to the Union Mission.

Before the YMCA youths arrived to help, one of Toliver’s gardens was about to become overwhelmed by harlequin stink bugs.

“We’re drowning the bugs, and we’re harvesting all the beans and the plants that are ready to be harvested,” said 11-year-old Hannah McCune. She was dressed in a brightly painted hanker-chief, green socks, and pink tennis shoes. She was also wearing garden gloves for what is sometimes a dirty job—finding and killing stink bugs.

It’s not a pretty job, but it’s a necessary one because the volunteer gardeners are committed to using no pesticides on the food they grow. It takes a lot of time to pick out the orange and black bugs by hand.

Stephanie Hysmith is the master gardener supervising the volunteers. She’s had experience with harlequin stink bugs and squash bugs, which can devastate vegetable gardens if ignored. “Last year I started with my zucchini going out and looking under the leaves. And I discovered [squash bug] eggs that were underneath the leaves.”

Hysmith is one of the volunteers most involved with Toliver’s gardens this year. On Tuesday, she taught the children from the YMCA summer camp about the various plants that grow throughout the garden.

One of the children asked her, “what do you do to the plants in the winter?”

“Well in the wintertime the plants go dormant. These are called annuals because they bloom once and then they die. You can save the seed from the fruit, and grow the same plant next year,” Hysmith explained.

Excitement erupted nearby when a blue tailed skink emerged from one of the raised beds and dove back beneath the beans.

In one morning, they harvest about 25 pounds of chard, collards, cucumbers, green beans and zucchini, which they deliver to the Union Mission the next day.

There, they learned about the somber realities of hunger in West Virginia.

And Tom Toliver was visibly moved from the response he’s received in the last week. His project has gotten a number of calls from people, wanting to support his community gardens.

“My big thought, my big vision, is to rub out hunger, totally, through community gardening. And that’s my strategy—is to start in Charleston, Kanawha County, West Virginia, America—encouraging people to live off the land. And you have seen yourself how easy it’s been to grow food,” Toliver said.

The vegetables that the YMCA kids harvested will be served or given away to families in need who come to Union Mission hungry. Some of these people will not have eaten for days.

The first part of this story about Tom Toliver’s West Side Gardens can be found here.