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Community Gardens are unique in their ability to bring people together to make all manner of magic happen. Blight sights are transformed into places of beauty, pumpkins emerge silently from compost heaps, and neighbours get to know each while sharing seeds and recipes.

Community gardens' impacts are as diverse as their landscapes. They provide a community meeting place, conserve and improve urban green spaces, foster healthy, engaged communities, and create many learning and cultural opportunities. Not to mention enabling people to grow their own delicious, clean, healthy food in an urban environment!

Environment
Community gardens improve the quality of urban environments, rehabilitating degraded and often hazardous land, contributing to urban greening, providing sanctuary to urban wildlife, and creating a setting for environmental education. They are also part of broader moves to ensure a secure and ecologically sensitive food supply.

Ecologically Sustainable Food Production
Community gardens demonstrate practical solutions to the negative environmental impacts of commercial food production. Bringing food production into cities reduces its ecological footprint by cutting down 'food miles' - the energy used to transport produce over many hundreds of kilometres from growers to processors to retailers to people's tables.

Care for soil and for biodiversity are at the heart of the organic practices used by most community gardens. These practices lower the economic and environmental costs of food production by minimising or eliminating chemical use, and returning nutrients to the soil.

The genetic diversity of our food is protected by community gardeners who grow and save the seeds of local plant varieties which are adapted to the particular conditions and cultures of the communities who grow them.

'Waste' Minimisation & Nutrient Cycling
Community gardens promote waste minimisation and nutrient cycling strategies, demonstrating composting techniques that can be used by people in their home gardens, and providing community composting facilities. Community gardens also support waste minimisation by demonstrating strategies for the creative reuse of discarded resources. In community gardens all over the world, bath tubs become aquaculture systems, scrap timber and metal are shaped into tool sheds, bed heads become trellises, old tyres are used as stabilisers for banks and earth berms, yesterday's news smothers weeds, and the kitchen sink is transformed into a thriving wormfarm.

Connection and Custodianship
A sense of belonging, connection and identity are vital prerequisites to a community which takes responsibility for the land it inhabits. Community gardens help to create a sense of place, of neighbourhood identity and cohesion. They provide opportunities for people to have an impact on the development of their community, and to take responsibility for its growth. Through redeveloping an everyday connection to the local environment, observing the quality of the seasons, nurturing a tree through its first months, taking sustenance from the soil and returning sustenance to it, we can take the first steps towards knowing and protecting our local regions.

Health
Nutrition and food security
Perhaps the greatest health benefit of community gardens is the promotion of a wide variety of fresh, locally grown vegetables and fruit. Community gardens can supplement families' diets with wholesome organic vegetables, and can also be a means for educating gardeners and the broader community about healthy food, providing enormous scope for positive experiences of the sensuousness, fun, and pleasure of growing, preparing, and eating good food. Community gardens can address food insecurity by allowing people to grow some of their own food at relatively low cost.

Psychological benefits
Community Gardening enhances gardeners' 'self-esteem' through the practical accomplishment of producing harvests of vegetables and flowers. Community gardens provide many opportunities for recreation and exercise. This may vary from a simple stroll amongst the flowers, to the day to day work of maintaining the garden - exercise carried out in convivial company, with a real sense of satisfaction and purpose. Reconnecting to the earth and to the natural processes of tending to soil and growing food may have a balancing effect on the human psyche, alleviating stress and providing opportunity for reflection and relaxation

Community Arts and Cultural Development
Celebrating Cultural Diversity Community
gardens are often a space for community members of diverse cultural backgrounds to practise and share traditional and contemporary expressions of their culture. This provides a unique opportunity for learning and exchange. Urban gardens can provide a critical link to culture through seeds that have been passed down for generations, and through the cultivation and preparation of traditional foods that are not available in local stores. Community gardens may also become venues for elders to explore their cultural traditions and celebrate their lives.

Community arts
Community gardens often integrate a range of community arts projects, from murals to sculptural installations, photo essays to poetry performance.

Events
Many community gardens create community culture through regular cycles of events. These may include fund-raising fairs, produce sales, music performances, story tellings or art exhibitions. Often, community gardens choose to mark the changing of the seasons, or events such as first fruitings, harvest, and sowing new seasons' seeds.

Community Development
Community gardens engage and involve people in their own communities. They give people the chance to physically shape the character and culture of their neighbourhoods, and to take responsibility for their common land.

Community gardens are a meeting space, bringing together diverse aspects of local communities. They allow neighbours to meet on neutral soil, and provide common ground for people of varying cultural backgrounds, experiences, ages, and interests.

Learn More

Campo de Oeste is an exciting new summer camp for Tucson youth ages 11-12 that: Provides a natural learning environment based on the principals of eco-psychology, Promotes leadership, personal development, and conservation with a low youth-mentor/ student ratio and fosters a fun, supportive environment where young people come together and are motivated to learn about pertinent issues (environmental, animal and humanitarian). Sessions are two weeks long and start June 1 and June 15th. Click here for more info.

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. Watch Now.

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Dig in! Campo Urbano has compost available for sale.

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Ranch: 4410 W Ironwood Hills Dr.
Office: 332 S Convent Ave Tucson, AZ 85701

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