AIGrow: AIO’s Community Garden Project

Help AIO win a $5000 grant!

Vote here by April 7.

AIGrow

AIO is on the grow again, this year to create a 100% edible and organically maintained landscape so we can offer even more food – and food choices – to our community. We believe it is best when our clients can shop and pick out the foods that are best for their families. Following the design principles of our inside space, which we modeled to look and feel like a grocery store, our clients will literally be able to pick what they want to eat fresh from our gardens.

Over the next five years, we will transform the industrial wasteland of gravel and grass that currently surrounds our new space into growing goodness: fresh fruit (think apples, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries) and perennial vegetables (asparagus, arugula, and rhubarb, oh my!) that give high yields with little maintenance.

We’ll line the path in and out with hanging baskets, containers, and raised beds for traditional annual veggies – tomatoes, squash, lettuce, cabbage, cucumbers, peppers, peas, beans, beets, and radishes – and turn our back yard into community garden plots open to anyone wanting to grow food for themselves or the pantry.

We are grounding our garden spaces in permaculture principles, letting what grows here now show us what we can grow tomorrow with minimal inputs. We’ll surround our fruit trees and shrubs with edible companions that attract beneficial insects, mine and share nutrients, and make our plantings as lovely to see as they are to eat!

We’ll plant barrels at the edges of our roof to save rainwater for a sunny day and compost bins at garden edges to recycle food wastes for next year’s crops. We’ll keep our root cellar cool with a covering of fruiting vines and set up picnic tables in the shady areas where growing anything but wood chips would be a challenge.

But the most important crops we are planting in this space won’t show on a garden plan or fill a berry basket. We are a growing community. We are growing resilience. We are growing a different way of approaching food security and better choices for our green spaces. We are combatting climate change by replacing energy-intensive lawns (can’t eat the grass) with plants that feed people, pollinators, and the planet. We are growing goodness.

What you can do: Help us win a $5000 grant!
Vote for our garden project (Deadline is April 7), then share it with everyone you know and ask them to vote too _ naturespath.com/en-us/gardens-for-good/#aio-community-gardens