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!
*
some partners: Southland Community Garden, Third Street Coffee, UKHDI, Latitude Artist Community, MHDDAS, ELandF Gallery small projects accelerator
