Help End World Hunger with a Community Garden
Introduction
A community garden is important because instead of wasting your money at a junky, unhealthy fast food restaurant you get delicious, crisp, and nutritious fruits and veggies ALL FOR FREE!!!! What could be better? While you're working at the garden, you get exercise and meet new friends. You are also helping out a great cause, so it's good for your mind, body, and soul. Also, you're going green and helping out Mother Nature. This is definetely a great solution to a ton of problems!
Volunteers
In order to keep your garden successful you need gardeners. The first thing you need to do is choose your garden's hours. While picking these think of when your gardeners are availiable. Anyway, you should have a group of at least 40 people who can shift from work and home cleaning to farming in the garden and monitoring the front desk. Twenty of these people will have to work at the garden part-time and the other twenty will work when the other twenty isn't. It is entirely up to you to decide your garden's hours. Keep in mind you should not pay people for working in your garden as it will be completely volunteer-oriented. You can also add people to your group as your garden starts to get bigger and better. If you like, you can even choose a leader who should be very responsible and buisness-like but friendly. Everyone who works at the garden should be paid with food. They should get as much food as they like as long as they don't go overboard (a whole patch of vegetables, for example). Do not forget that if people want food, they HAVE to work. Don't go giving out free food! Please remember all these tips to have a successful garden.
Space
Next it is vital to determine the garden's location. It should be easily accessible to both the gardeners and the people it will serve. If there is space near your school, that should be the first place you should consider. Make a phone call to the superintendent of your school. district asking if it's possible to use district grounds for your garden. If so, and if the space is large enough for your target group, contact Diggers Hotline or a similar organization in your state that can mark out the locations of water mains, electrical wires, and gas/sewage pipes. You definetely don't want to hit these! Once you've determined location, size, and saftey, you can begin your garden.
Advertising
In order to advertise your garden you could make fliers. Here are some places in your community that you could hang them:
-Gas Station
-Library
-Local Schools
-Zoo
-Grocery Stores
-Restaurants
-Post Office
-Churches
You want to make sure that you are hanging these fliers in places in your community because people that aren't in your community might get the wrong idea. Make sure you write the name of your community on the fliers. Also make sure that the places you hang the fliers will allow you to. Another way to advertise your garden is to put an advertisement in your local newspaper. This might cost more than other types of advertisements so make sure that you have enough money to pay for this kind of advertisement. Try to keep your budget low while paying for the advertisements because you need plenty of money to start the garden in the first place. You should make your advertisements look nice and professional. You want to approach the people in your community in a friendly and fun way. Decorate your flier in any way you like. Have fun!
Pest Control
When you start a garden know this: there is DEFINETELY going to be pests. If you want to protect your garden from them, follow these instructions. Fences are great because they keep large animals away, while smaller animals are repeled simply by planting different types of flowers or shrubs. (For example: Rabbits think marigolds smell like sweatsocks.) There is also a chemical that smells like wolf urine that keeps almost all animals away. The only two downfalls are that (1) it smells absolutely downright HORRIBLE until about an hour after you spray it and (2) you have to respray it every week. Weeds are yet another problem for your garden. You can either spend long hours pulling them up, or take the easy way out. Step 1: Fill a spray bottle with vinegar and spray all the weeds. Step 2: To kill large areas of weeds, sprinkle a bit of rock salt on everything you want to shrivel up. WARNING: Don't put this on any of your fruits or veggies! Step 3: To prevent weeds from making more of themselves, scatter some cornmeal. Now your garden is completely protected!