Benicia Community Gardens’ Elena Karoulina says group’s vision is ‘distributed urban farm’
A University of California Cooperative Extension research report shows that gardeners can save money by growing their own produce, and that more people are participating in community gardens.
What’s more, said Elena Karoulina, executive director of Benicia Community Gardens, there are other benefits of gardens that can’t be measured.
“Low-income people in cities may be able to improve their nutrition by eating fresh vegetables grown in community gardens,” said Susan Algert, UC Cooperative Extension nutrition adviser and the author of the research.
Algert works with the extension service in Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco counties. For her study, she recruited 10 gardeners in San Jose to weigh the vegetables they grew in community gardens during spring and summer.
Most of those gardeners grew tomatoes, squash, green beans, peppers, onions, eggplants and cucumbers, Algert wrote. They harvested three-quarters of a pound of vegetables for each square foot of planted area, she found — more than the six-tenths of a pound per square foot that the U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates as typical from conventional farming.
Algert wrote that community gardens produce 2.55 pounds of food per plant during four months. Had those same vegetables been bought from retail outlets, they would have cost $435 more than the cost of planting and caring for them, she wrote.
The larger savings came through growing such high-value crops as tomatoes and peppers that grow vertically and occupy less ground. Savings can vary, and Algert noted that the gardeners who participated in the study are experienced. “A novice gardener would likely need training to get the same results,” she said.
“We know that community gardens can be an important source of fruits and vegetables for people who don’t live near a grocery store or a farmers market,” Algert said.
“This study shows that vegetables from community gardens can also be more affordable than buying from a store. That’s important to people who live on a low or fixed income.”
Karoulina said it’s challenging to determine the monetary yield from a garden, but added that other bonuses are “physical activity, sense of emotional well-being and belonging to a community, time spent in nature and the health benefits of consuming fresh, organic produce.”
She said the three-quarter-pound yield for each square foot is “a misleading number. As with any ‘average’ number, the devil is in details.”
She said many Benicia gardeners grow lettuce and greens in winter, though their yield in pounds might not be very high. “You have to look at volume,” she said.
“On the other hand, our most popular summer plant — tomato — can bring up to 20 pounds per plant! This is why we are estimating our yields in ‘market baskets.’”
Karoulina said that measurement isn’t very scientific, “but we have a large basket used to bring donations to the Senior Center. During the summer peak season, we can fill a basket per garden bed, if zucchini, squashes, tomatoes and corn are grown.”
In addition, the gardens have community herbal beds that save space in member’s garden beds, she said.
Benicia’s community gardens are tended by members who pay an annual fee of $70 for their spaces either at Swenson Garden at Heritage Presbyterian Church or the Avant Garden on First Street.
The gardeners’ annual fee covers the cost of water, insurance and organic soil amendments, Karoulina said. However, “We never turn people away for lack of funds, and every year, we accommodate families that cannot afford to pay this amount,” she said.
She pointed out that gardeners may spend between $10 and $30 on seeds and seedlings each season, or about $100 for vegetables that can be harvested almost weekly from late spring to early fall and alternating weeks in winter.
“This sounds like a good deal to me!” she said.
In addition, a family can stretch its dollars through perennial plants rather than annual ones that need replanting every year.
“A couple years ago, we turned our attention to a more sustainable form of backyard, small-scale agriculture — orchards and permaculture food forests,” Karoulina said.
Her group planted its first community orchard of 21 carefully selected trees at Heritage Presbyterian Church in March.
“Once established, it’s expected to provide over 120 pounds of fruits and nuts per participating family,” she said.
“A large portion of this bounty will be donated to community members in need.”
It costs $50 a year for a family to participate in the orchard project, Karoulina said, and the return on investment “is definitely positive!”
She noted Algert’s comment about how level of expertise may affect vegetable production.
“In our gardens, we are proud to observe that even beginners in gardening usually succeed during their very first gardening season,” Karoulina said. “We attribute it to extensive help and advice they are receiving from our volunteer garden coordinator, Sheila Clyatt, who is a master gardener, and to good condition of soil in the garden beds in general.”
That guidance isn’t limited to gardeners, she said. “All our workshops and classes are free and open to the public. On any given day of the week, people come to the Avant Garden, thanks to its central location, to look at what’s growing, to find new plants and to ask for advice.
“To provide education and inspiration for the entire community is a big part of our mission.”
She said the community garden’s leaders use organic soil from Organic Solutions, a local composting company, for each garden bed.
“Every year, we deliver fresh organic compost to both gardens, and encourage each gardener to use on-site-produced compost and chicken manure available from local stores,” she said.
“Benicia Community Gardens pays for the construction of new beds and new soil. We just added 12 new beds to Swenson garden.”
Karoulina described the community gardens group’s latest project, Benicia Sustainable Backyard, which introduces permaculture to Benicia.
Permaculture is a term for permanent agriculture that can be sustained indefinitely. While others sought that as a goal earlier, an Austrian farmer named Sepp Holzer was among the first, in the 1960s, to use modern permaculture concepts in a systematic way.
“We envision food forests throughout Benicia, on both private and public land,” Karoulina said. “One of permaculture’s principles is ‘no outside input’ once established. Can you imagine a small food forest — nut and fruit trees, with dense underplanting of berries, grapes, perennial food plants, some annuals, and even mushrooms — that is fed by reused water and with little maintenance produces food for a family for years to come?”
She said families with such a “food forest” in their back yards, with the addition of a protein source such as eggs, would have food security in the long run.
“We envision a ‘Benicia Community Farm,’ a distributed urban farm, where many families produce different food in their backyard and exchange-barter the surplus of it,” she said.
Karoulina said the conversation about food dollars stemming from Algert’s study needs to lead to a “just, sustainable, healthy and affordable food system for all. This is Benicia Community Gardens’ vision for our town.”
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