Creating Community with Baltimore’s Urban Gardeners

Urban green spaces benefit communities by improving aesthetics, increasing property values, and providing space for outdoor recreation and socializing. While municipally-managed parks are essential components of a city’s outdoor recreation spaces, a large portion of Baltimore’s green infrastructure exists as community gardens, restored vacant lots, and pocket parks. These spaces are often developed and managed by volunteers who depend on unreliable and often one-time donations from local businesses and neighbors.

Limited sources of financial support can be found through small grants and, most often, out-of-pocket spending to purchase or rent gardening tools, and materials . During a city-wide Greening Baltimore Workshop hosted by the Parks & People Foundation (PPF) in 2003, urban greeners consistently expressed the need for training opportunities (i.e. in community organizing, green space planning and design, and fundraising) and material resources (i.e. compost, mulch, plant material, and tools). While a variety of programs existed to support community greening, a coordinated, city-wide effort to provide comprehensive support targeting needs identified by community green space stewards had yet to be realized.

Seeking a successful model for comprehensive urban greening support, Kari Smith of PPF, and colleague Chrissa Carlson of Maryland Cooperative Extension, sat down together and formulated a plan. They researched and evaluated greening resource programs in other urban cities, including the Garden Resource Program Collaborative (GRPC) in Detroit. GRPC enrolls over 600 gardens and coordinates over 40 workshops, including a cooking-series and a nine-week community garden training course. It was evident that GRPC was a highly successful model for offering comprehensive training and material support to urban greeners and could be replicated in Baltimore.

The Community Greening Resource Network (CGRN, pronounced “see-green”) is a joint project of the Parks & People Foundation and Maryland Cooperative Extension. CGRN is a membership program with a framework for easy and accessible distribution of materials and information. One of the goals of CGRN is to connect existing events, organizations, and policies in Baltimore City to prevent duplicative efforts.

There are several parts to the network. CGRN has established Community Tool Banks at area organizations with hand tools for gardens to borrow. The tools that any one organization has can be supplemented and made available to the gardening community as a whole. In conjunction with existing seed and plant give-away days there are four annual Give-Away Days for plant material distribution. CGRN also compiled a 2009 Shared Calendar of greening workshops and events taking place in Baltimore throughout the year, and a quarterly newsletter provides articles, networking information, and garden highlights; discounts on power tools at local stores, workshops, an online map, tours, pot-lucks, and celebrations.

CGRN began enrolling members just three months ago and is a quarter of the way to the goal of having 100 members by the end of this first year. Anyone can become a member. (see details at the end of this article) Hamilton Crop Circle, one of CGRN’s garden members, began as a backyard garden three years ago and now has a strong base of about 20 community members. Last year, their greens were featured on the menu at Clementine’s, a local Hamilton restaurant (See:hamiltoncropcircle.blogspot.com/). They hope that the CGRN framework for networking with other community gardens will help build a food-producing garden at Hamilton Elementary School.

Baltimore’s goal of “doubling its tree canopy from 20 percent to 40 percent within 30 years” is ambitious, but will consist primarily of street trees. Some people, however, are looking to increase Baltimore’s food tree canopy as well. The Montpelier Orchard in Better Waverly broke ground just this past year in a vacant lot owned by the City. Though they hadn’t been gardening for very long, and aren’t a traditional vegetable garden, this orchard found something appealing in CGRN. “We installed the underground irrigation system in preparation for the major planting work-day for Montpelier Orchard, and much to our chagrin we ran into a considerable amount of compacted clay. As a result I trying to find an inexpensive resource for topsoil so that these regions can have raised beds,” says Pat Shaw, manager of the orchard.

Through the network of gardens, greeners, teaching organizations, government agencies, nurseries, landscape companies, and students, the orchard found what it was looking for. Topsoil was delivered last fall and many fruit tree saplings were in the ground before the first snow.

Several school gardens are also members of CGRN. Securing tools and dealing with liability is often an issue on school grounds, but through the Community Tool Banks, these tools are now available. Taking the yearly task of selecting and purchasing seeds and plants for the garden off the shoulders of often over-extended teachers is another benefit of the network.

We have grossed approximately $1,400 in in-kind donations to support the Give-Away Days. A significant amount has come from Valley View Farms in Cockeysville. At the end of the fall season, the nursery donated all remaining perennial flowers, grasses, and ground covers to the network. Those plants would otherwise have been tossed out to make room for new ones coming in the spring. CGRN sets up a system to channel those plants to gardens that can grow them and beautify our city. There were few if any similar programs existing in Baltimore before CGRN.

There have been many attempts to present information in a consolidated way for those interested in greening, but with little lasting success. Erika S. Svendsen of the U.S. Forest Service has been involved in documenting the evolution of garden sites in Baltimore, and PPF has been cataloguing green spaces for some time now, but there has never been a comprehensive support network established to help green space managers in their efforts to maintain gardens over the long term.

One advantage CGRN has over similar programs that came before it is the recent emphasis on greening Baltimore. Tony Geraci, Baltimore City’s new food service director, is transforming Bragg Nature Center into a functioning farm to provide fresh, local produce to city schools. The Baltimore Urban Agriculture Task Force is working to establish farm incubators to provide 300 green jobs in the next five years. The purpose of a new website, www.goforchange.com, is to be the ultimate online meeting place and business for grassroots greening activities. With all this on the table, attempting to meet the actual needs of Baltimore’s gardeners isn’t such a huge step to take.

CGRN has two tiers of membership. Community-managed green spaces can become members by filling out a short application and submitting photos of their greenspace, a $10 yearly membership fee, and a written acknowledgment to work with CGRN staff. If you don’t have a community garden but want to become involved in the network, membership is $5 per year and requires a short application. For more information, please see http://www.parksandpeople.org/programs_great_parks_greening_CGRN.html.