Welcome to The Kentucky Tomato Project Homepage!
The Southland Community Garden, Lexington, June 08'
Last year the Southland Community Garden in Lexington partnered with a community arts program called Latitude to grow tomatoes with participating artists. Latitude works with anyone to provide great community interactions and they happen to serve many artists who are considered by some to have a disability. Even though they did not have land for a garden, artists in the program grew tomato plants which were then transplanted in the Southland Community Garden. Later in the summer the tomatoes were harvested and given back to the artists for thier own use.
artists and tomatoes August 08'
The results were amazing! Artists were so excited to receive the fresh produce which they had helped to grow. The artists began to study the situation and it dawned on them that simply growing tomatoes opened the doors for many amazing, healthful, community interactions. Not only that, they found that a $2.00 tomato plant purchased at Wal-Mart yielded between, 20 to 40 tomatoes per plant. When they checked prices at Kroger’s they discovered that large tomatoes were selling for almost $1.00 a piece- so you can see that by growing one $2.00 tomato plant you can harvest up to $40.00 worth of tomatoes- wow!
Our special goal for the Kentucky Tomato Project is to help create gardening opportunities for those of us who are considered by some to have disabilities. We hope people will either start a few seedlings or make that trip to your local farmers market, nursery, super market, etc. to pick up a plant to grow this year.
no spot for a garden- no problem- Mobile Community Garden Unit #2
To help our efforts we have begun a blog on which we will post things like growing info and links to regional garden resources- but even more fun, anyone can send in pictures of their plants, recipes, stories and more and we will post them on this webpage. For those of you, who have been gardening all along, please share your knowledge, stories, and pictures with us!
our email address: KyTomatoProj@yahoo.com Stay in touch!
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some partners: Southland Community Garden, Third Street Coffee, UKHDI, Latitude Artist Community, MHDDAS, ELandF Gallery small projects accelerator
As we write this in mid August we all agree that our tomato project has been a big hit! We had hoped to do more documenting throughout the summer- and pics are still rolling in -so as we get them we'll add them to our blog.
One neat story- a taxi driver who drives some of our artists home was given a plant- as were the artists he drives- he has been checking out their plants as they grow and tells us that they are producing lots of tomatoes- and so is the plant that he took home!
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We have been meeting with folks at UK's Human Development Institute and we are currently exploring ways in which our program can be expanded and strengthened next year. 
Rebecca brought in one of the tomatoes that she grew at home from a plant we gave her. She took it back home and ate it- Oh Yeah!
Here is a an update from the gardeners at LexPro
