The Home Gardening Project Foundation
how to give raised-bed vegetable gardens to people in need
Gallery of Gardens 1 2 3
Photos of gardens & gardeners
Articles about HGP
Smithsonian:
"The Gift of a Garden" 
Sun: "Giving Away Gardens"
Sun: "Payday"
How to Give Away Gardens
download free how-to booklet for starting a Home Gardening Project (PDF)
Building raised-bed gardens
See how we built 1400 gardens
Diagram and materials list
Urban gardening and the benefits of gardening: Links to other sites
"How to garden" links: books and sites about raised beds, composting, what and how to plant
Loading soil for garden building.
What is The Home Gardening Project Foundation?
We started by building gardens...
The Home Gardening Project Foundation practices community preventive medicine by giving complete raised-bed vegetable gardens to the aged, the disabled, single-parent mothers and large families. We began in Portland, Oregon, where we built 150 new gardens a year in disadvantaged neighborhoods--1400 total--benefitting the participants and the city in general. About 85% of participants in Portland continued gardening the second year. Other groups, inspired and helped by HGPF, have built thousands more throughout the country.
Participants receive, at no cost to them, a complete vegetable garden installed at their home. The gardens consist of one, two or three 5'x8' soil-frames, made from 2"x8" boards, filled with weed-free organic soil, as well as seeds, starts, fertilizer, instructions, a trellis, tomato cages, a cookbook, monitoring, a newsletter, gardening advice and a second-year start-up program of seeds, starts, and manure. A garden of three raised beds provides 120 square feet of growing area.
Gardens provide the fresh vegetables which are essential for health, but are often edged out of poor peoples' diets by cheaper more filling starches and sweets. "Food insecurity" and outright hunger continue to increase in our country: the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported that in 2003 requests for emergency food assistance increased in 88 percent of the 25 cities surveyed. Over half the cities said that people in need were turned away due to lack of resources. [Source: U.S. Conference of Mayors, Hunger and Homelessness 2003, 12/18/03.] Need has increased especially among families with children and elderly persons, two groups well-served by HGP gardens that are built in their own yards and need no digging or tilling.
Now we help others to start garden-building projects...
During our 14 years in Portland, every year we received inquiries from individuals who read about the HGP and wanted to know how to start one in their community. HGP founder Dan Barker wrote a how-to booklet to help them get started, and some were able to do so, but many ran into problems getting initial funding. They had a new idea and no personal track record with it, so funding agencies were reluctant. Clearly, there needed to be some source of start-up funding; when Dan left building after 14 years, he turned the HGP nonprofit that had built gardens, into the HGP Foundation to raise money for funding new garden-building projects. Since 1996 the national foundation has helped dozens of groups and individuals to get started, from Tallahassee, Florida, to Flint, Michigan, and Boston, Massachusetts. Some have gotten financial help, others found their own funding but benefitted from detailed instructions on garden-building, finding and working with the recipients, and locating the best materials. All were encouraged and inspired by the original HGP's example.
How do we go about this?
Based on our twenty years of experience we screen applicants carefully. Building gardens is hard work, physically and often emotionally, and requires good organizational skills as well as the ability to set participants at their ease and encourage them without being intrusive. Our grant application form includes a worksheet requiring the applicant to do the specific planning and budgeting, and locate the resources, that will be needed to start a project in their area. It helps us evaluate their commitment and ability, and the completed worksheet will function as their action plan. Extensive interviews are also part of the final application process. Once a grant is made, HGPF founder Dan Barker provides written instruction materials, and more guidance through frequent phone conversations as new builders prepare for and begin building. Garden-builders make progress reports before and during the season, and Dan visits new projects at the end of the season to see the results and compile a photo record.
In each place the idea develops a little differently: Some use the model for a weekend church project, others for their group’s social contribution. Others adapt the notion to fashion their own method of providing social and physical sustenance; e.g. Flint’s transformation of abandoned and unkempt yards into block gardens (Flint Urban Gardening and Land Use Corporation, FUGLUC, Flint, Michigan). And still others, like the Kitchen Garden Project (now GRUB, in Olympia, Washington), build gardens for the house-bound and aged, as well as fostering a youth employment program, growing fresh flowers, making dried flower arrangements, making garden stepping stones, and building large vegetable gardens for care facilities, setting and fulfilling goals like a garden for every Head-Start program or every school. Or like the Garden Angels (Los Angeles) , three hundred school children who organized into crop clubs and donate their produce to shelters and homeless kitchens. Some others stay with the fundamental idea and build as many gardens as money and energy permit; for example, the group that built 1000 gardens in Bangladesh.
Besides the fresh healthy food provided, there are great psychological and physical benefits from gardening. Children, the elderly, and the handicapped can all work easily in a raised-bed garden, and no tilling is ever needed because the soil is not compacted by being walked on. The model we have worked out makes it easy for people to succeed. The raised beds warm up earlier in spring and are filled with top-quality soil for good crops regardless of local conditions (which may include soil that is rocky, worn-out, or contaminated with lead). Participants receive seeds and starts, tomato cages and a trellis, and instruction in intensive planting methods. When the builders leave, the completed garden belongs to the participant, who has everything needed to start gardening right then.
Our goal is raising money for seed-grant funding to 20 new Projects in 20 new cities each year for the next 10 years. Giving away vegetable gardens is simply genuine beneficence. The benefits resonate at every level of society. Costs are minimal, but the yields are great. In our area, the total cost of building a 3-bed raised vegetable garden is about $600, which includes lumber, soil, seeds, plants, labor, and vehicle insurance. The garden will last for 5 to 10 years with replenishment of soil, and can provide all the vegetables for a family of four during the growing season. By any standards, that is a very good return.
We turn money into health and joy; we build vegetable gardens for those who are the mothers and sisters, fathers and children, of us all. It is the ambition of the Home Gardening Project Foundation to foster garden-building programs in every city as permanent features of the social landscape, so that if you need a vegetable garden someone will come to build it for you. We, most of us, all get old and our bodies fail us. Poverty, age, and health problems can all make a person's world shrink, drain the hope and joy from life. Vegetable gardens help reduce that suffering. (More on benefits of gardening)
If you would like to make a contribution to this work, please contact us, below. All contributions will be dedicated to the support of new or existing garden-building work.
The Home Gardening Project Foundation is a non-profit corporation and contributions from US residents are tax-deductible (501c3 status granted by the US IRS in 1986).
Please direct contributions or inquiries to:
Dan A. Barker, Director
The Home Gardening Project Foundation
8060 Upper Applegate Rd.
Jacksonville, Oregon 97530
USA 541-899-1114
Gallery of Gardens 1 2 3 Photos of garden building How gardens help people E-mail us
Read more about HGP:
articles from Smithsonian | Sun Magazine | Vegetable gardening resources (links)
© 2005 The Home Gardening Project Foundation. Last updated October 2005.
Why give away gardens? Here's one answer...
Food stamp use is up by over 1 million in 1 year
Food stamp participation rose in July 2005 to 25,564,100, for an over-the-year increase of nearly 1.16 million people.
Participation has risen in 48 of the last 55 months.
Nonetheless, research suggests that nearly half of all eligible people are not receiving food stamp benefits.
and another...
Gardening Is Good For You
Experts are beginning to look beyond the agricultural to the physical and mental benefits of gardening. Not only do gardeners tend to eat fresh vegetables throughout the growing season, but the physical acts involved increase fitness and combat depression.
Researchers found that raking a lawn or planting seeds take as much energy as casual bicycling... Physical therapists are prescribing gardening to extend the range of motion for people recovering from automobile accidents. In some nursing homes, the Eden Alternative movement is involving residents and staff in a gardening program that has resulted in a reduction in the use of drugs to treat depression, lower employee turnover, and bring about a drop in the death rate.
"We have found that gardening benefits those that are already healthy and is perfect therapy for the elderly," explains John Morley, Dammert Professor of Gerontology and director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine, Saint Louis (Mo.) University School of Medicine. "Gardening has also [been] shown to decrease depression and be an adaptable exercise for disabled people." (Society for the Advancement of Education article)
Children and gardening
Many communities now have gardening programs for children, recognizing the many benefits: Gardening helps kids learn to appreciate nature and respect growing things. They learn about the food they eat, and where it comes from. Often kids will try new vegetables, or learn to like vegetables more, after they have grown them. The taste and eye appeal of food fresh from the garden can create a new attitude about healthy eating.
Gardens are good family activities, with something for every age. They teach responsibility with direct feedback: too late with the water, and plant leaves droop and growth slows.
