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
About us: our history and mission, and how to help give gardens to people
"How to garden" links: books and sites about raised beds, composting, what and how to plant
LINKS on this page: Home Gardening Projects in the US | Benefits of Gardening | Urban Gardening |
Another page has our links to books and webpages on how to garden
Gardening is deep in our genes. The earliest agriculture, over ten thousand years ago, was doubtless a form of gardening: encouraging existing plants that people knew to be beneficial, by providing extra water, protecting them from grazing animals, or clearing away the competitors we call weeds. The next step was gathering seeds or roots and planting them deliberately, which led to selecting (perhaps unconsciously) those which did best under human care, or produced more of the tasty grains or medicinal leaves. In the highlands of New Guinea it is still gardening, not big fields of crops, that feeds people, and the same is true in many areas of Asia and Africa.
Our own country has always valued gardening; Thomas Jefferson was devoted to collecting and cultivating new varieties of plants, and "kitchen gardens" were the major source of vegetables and fruits for Americans before canning and freezing helped bring us industrial agriculture. In recent decades, millions have returned to the kitchen garden idea in order to save money and have fresher more nutritious produce, with fewer chemicals. And the psychological and social benefits of gardening are well known; it's even good exercise!
Home Gardening Projects serve people who are not able to set up gardens for themselves, because of age, low income, physical limitations, lack of knowledge, or backyard soil that is rocky, worn-out, or contaminated with urban toxins such as lead. We also build gardens at group sites: schools, hospices, shelters, group homes, and other institutions.
The difference between our programs and community garden programs, is that we build gardens where people live. In fact our recommendation for the ideal garden location has always been "a sunny place close to the back door or kitchen". From our own experience we know that the closer the garden is to the kitchen, the more often the produce will be used. Community gardens are valuable, too, and we applaud cities which give them support.
But we must also think of all the people who lack time, health and energy, or transportation, needed to reach a community garden plot. These people are often our most vulnerable citizens to whom a home garden can make an incredible difference in life. Gardens get people out into the sunshine, whether to water or harvest or just to look at their garden and see what's new, what's blooming, what might be good for dinner tonight. HGP gardens are designed for success: plant, water, and stand back! And we saw many folks who hadn't known success in years, taking delight in their flourishing gardens. "It's so beautiful, I keep going out to look at it." "My beans and tomatoes are doing so well I have been giving them to my neighbors." An elderly lady found her garden turning into a social center as her friends came over in the afternoons to sit with her by the garden, chatting and enjoying its colors and life, and going home with some produce or flowers. Youngsters became their family's food providers when they took on the responsibility for the garden, and all the children learned where food really comes from, and how it really tastes.
There are many ways to support gardening in your community. Our mission is to help others continue on the path of the original Home Gardening Project, in which Dan Barker built over 1400 gardens in the Portland, Oregon area. He started a nonprofit to raise the money, and did nearly all the work himself, with one or two helpers each spring to assist with the building. After the first year, there was always a waiting list of people signed up by mid-spring to get gardens the following year--a powerful indicator of success.
And every year he received more inquiries from individuals who read about the HGP and wanted to know how to start one in their community. Dan 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, and 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 he 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.
In each place the idea develops a little differently: the Kitchen Garden Project (now Garden-Raised Bounty GRUB) in Olympia, Washington, involved students from Evergreen College as volunteers, and its successor GRUB has added programs for high school students who grow produce for restaurants and teach classes on gardening. In Flint, Michigan, block gardens have been important, and strong neighborhood unity has grown up around the gardens which has translated into other forms of positive community action (see links in next paragraph).
LINKS to more information
Home Gardening Projects around the US
Here are some sites illustrating the range and accomplishments of HGP- inspired projects. [Some garden-building projects do not have websites. And some of the folks who have received help and training from us have done the building under the non-profit umbrellas of other groups: city agencies, churches, and so on.]
The Flint, Michigan gardening program actually began with the desire to bring people together to reduce neighborhood violence. A community member contacted the HGPF in 1997 after reading about the project's success in Portland, received a start-up grant from us along with information and encouragement, and the result has been the Flint Urban Gardening and Land Use Corporation (FUGLUC). For people in Flint, urban gardening became a positive way to use vacant lots--12% of the city's land is vacant due to unemployment and job flight. Gardens in these lots are shared and watched over by the nearby residents, who can easily walk over to their gardens. FUGLUC has even published a book, From Seeds to Stories, which arose from The Community Garden Storytelling Project. The book shows the positive effects of the gardens upon "neighbor social relationships, neighborhood pride, beautification, neighborhood crime prevention, exercise and fruit and vegetable consumption".
The Kitchen Garden Project in Olympia, Washington,was the first program begun on the model of the Home Gardening Project, way back in 1990. From the beginning, founder Rich Doss involved Evergreen College students as volunteers in building raised-bed vegetable gardens for low-income people in the Olympia area, including on the Snohomish reservation. KGP, now Garden-Raised Bounty (GRUB), has expanded into garden-related youth projects, but still builds raised-bed gardens for needy people, at their homes.
Benefits of Gardening: physical, social, psychological
Gardening is good exercise, something everyone can participate in: children, elderly, those with physical limitations--especially with raised beds to lessen the work and bring the garden closer. Home Gardening Project gardens are designed to make success very easy, so they encourage all gardeners to continue.
Gardens can lessen stress, promote relaxation, even help stave off (and also relieve) Alzheimer's disease.
A participant in the University of Michigan Community Health Scholars' program speaks about her two-year research work with the neighborhood gardens in Flint, Michigan, and the unexpected effects she found... "And so they've told me time and time again that I didn't know my neighbors before the community garden and I was very fearful and if there was something going on in the street I didn't know who belonged on the street and who didn't and I didn't know if I should be calling the cops or not because I wasn't sure of what was going on. But now, with the garden, I've met my neighbors, I've met the kids in the neighborhood through working in the garden and if I see the kids breaking windows I can call them out and I can call their parents because I know where they belong and know where they live and I know who I can talk to and I know that if I talk to their parents their parents aren't going to retaliate against me because we're friends now...
Nutrition
The USDA has good reason for recommending 10 daily servings of fruit and vegetables now: "A Harvard School of Public Health of 120,000 nurses or health workers found that those who had very high intakes of fruits and vegetables had the lowest risk for heart disease. In other studies, fruit and vegetable intake has been shown to lower blood pressure. It has also been shown that higher consumption of certain fruits and vegetables has lowered the risk against certain cancers...[But] we Americans have a long way to go to get up to these recommended levels. Only 23% of adults eat at least 5 daily servings of fruits and vegetables, and only 4% of the males consume 9. About one-third of the population eats only one or two servings a day."
Involving children in vegetable gardening can often change their habits and food preferences, in a healthy direction:
Grazing in the garden, better than candy! Here's part of a story, from a 14-year old girl who works and eats at the East Bishop/East Flint Park Block Club garden in Flint,Michigan: "One day, I was going to the store, and before I went to the store, I went down to the garden with some of my friends. And we looked to see if there was any tomatoes, and there was one, big, juicy, red tomato. And I was like, oh, I want this, so I grabbed it, I washed it off, I took it home, put some pepper on it, and then I was eating it on my way, going to the store. And I was going to the store, I was thinking like, this tomato is better than the Now and Laters that I want. And so the garden did make me so I didn't want any more candy, ever since. I eat it some of the time, but basically, I have a fruit or something. I used to be a candy freak, but now after all the vegetables that you get, they're good. They're like candy, but they're healthy!" from the book From Seeds to Stories: the Community Garden Storytelling Project of Flint.
Cerebral palsy forces Chaz Floyd to live in a wheelchair, but it doesn't stop him from growing vegetables for his family's dinner table. In fact, 8-year-old Chaz prefers broccoli to candy if you give him a choice between the two, says his mother, Pam Floyd."I have two vegetable freaks," she says.For two years, Chaz and his veggie-loving brother, 6-year-old Dustin, have participated in the children's vegetable garden program at Norfolk Botanical Garden."The boys had a ball. It was really good for their self-esteem. They do everything -- prepare the soil, seed and water."
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is supporting school garden initiatives and "garden-based learning" to help improve both the nutrition and the education of children. "The main benefit of school gardens is that children learn how to grow healthy food and how to use it for better nutrition...Beyond this, school gardens also serve for environmental education and for personal and social development by adding a practical dimension to these subjects. They may also reinforce basic academic skills like reading, writing, biology and arithmetic."
Urban Gardening, Community Gardening, Food security
Urban gardening adds green space, enables garden-site composting of materials which would otherwise have to be hauled away by the city, soaks up rainwater, encourages birds and butterflies, provides healthy at-home recreation for children and adults, and all the other benefits of gardening.
The Food Security Learning Center's links page describes more than 20 international organizations concerned with food and gardening as they are linked in different nations: "allotment" programs in Britain and France, "leisure gardening" in Germany, the St. Petersburg Urban Gardening Club in Russia. Other groups listed are engaged in efforts ranging from "supporting and researching horticulture for disadvantaged, disabled and older people" (in the UK) to "training both male and female farmers in sustainable agro-forestry techniques" (in The Gambia).
The Best Practices Database is a searchable database which "contains over 2150 proven solutions from more than 140 countries to the common social, economic and environmental problems of an urbanizing world." These concern all aspects of urban life, not just gardening/urban agriculture. The site is sponsored by the UN's Habitat program and the Together Fund. Awards are given annually to the top ten "best practices".
The Resource centre on Urban Agriculture and Forestry (RUAF) is a global resource centre initiated by the international Support Group on Urban Agriculture. Its site tends towsard the academic and organizational, but has a very long page of annotated links to urban gardening-related sites in many countries.
Urban gardening takes many forms. Community or group gardens are common in the US and ofen receive city funding.
- The San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) is a non-profit which took over the community gardening program in that city when federal CETA funding ceased. SLUG now has a staff of 30, $1.6 million annual budget from the Parks Dept., and operates 100 garden areas as well as youth projects and "Enterprise" programs (including a wood-chipping operation, converts garden waste into chips and compost for citizens on a fee basis) that provide job training and make money. Organizers wrote, of urban gardening, "As times get tougher in cities across the country, more and more communities are turning to gardening as a medium to address urban needs for education, employment and community development. Like grass sprouting through pavement, these community inspirations come in the context of tightening economies and shrinking federal and local budgets. Jobs are scarce and tenuous. Never has the time been so ripe for a national movement helping urban communities to revitalize themselves through gardening. As Congress threatens cuts to job-training programs and welfare assistance, national and local groups are initiating creative projects which hold enormous potential for reversing economic hardship, social instability and environmental degradation."
- In Russia, the St. Petersburg Urban Gardening Club has been successful with rooftop gardens on state-owned apartment buildings, as well as using worms to compost kitchen waste for the gardens. Community gardens, where many people share a single large space or have separate plots within such a space, are widespread, and provide all the benefits of gardening. Residents of Havana, Cuba, began new private and group vegetable gardens in the 1990's because of food shortages. In Canada the City Farmer - Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture - has been promoting city gardening for 27 years; their site has links to international sites on urban gardening, and some gardening infomation too.
Gallery of Gardens Our mission and how to help Photos of garden building How gardens help people E-mail us
Read more about HGP: articles from Smithsonian | Sun Magazine
© 2005 The Home Gardening Project Foundation. Last updated October 2005.
Why give away gardens? Here's one answer...
"It's much more than being a farmer...you're out to help people and make this little part of the world farmable and productive, make your little street or block a better place, make the world healthier..."
--Nathan Glenn, Cultivating Youth participant at Garden-Raised Bounty (GRUB)
A new young gardener begins to learn about planting.
Why do the elderly often have inadequate nutrition?
(and why gardens help!)
"Getting enough of the more than 40 nutrients needed for good health can be hard for people who are eating small amounts. Many other factors may also contribute:
• The body may not properly use the nutrients it does receive. For example, to process calcium, the body needs vitamin D, which is provided by sunlight. But many elderly people get little exposure to the sun, and when they do, their skin doesn't absorb vitamin D as well as it once did.
• Food may not be very appealing or enjoyable, because taste and smell become less sharp with age. Disease and medications can affect these senses too.
• Shopping and cooking may be painful or difficult because of arthritis, walking problems, or lack of transportation.
• Cooking for one usually isn't much fun. Loneliness and depression may add to disinterest and loss of appetite.
• Limited funds can present problems at the grocery store.
How can nutritional intake be improved?
Increasing the amount of exercise might be a good way to start. Mild exercise, such as walking, not only gets the appetite going, it helps maintain muscle strength and control blood sugar levels." (above from Postgraduate Medicine Online)
Backyard gardens address these problems:
Gardens lessen the need for painful expensive shopping trips, yield high quality healthy food that tempts the tastebuds, gardeners get sunshine, and the mild exercise encourages the appetite. Being outdoors, having harvests to look forward to, and exercising, are all known to reduce depression. Even social interaction increases, as gardeners encounter their neighbors, have their garden progress to talk about and even extra produce to give away.
Food and flowers together.
Enzymes in fruits and vegetables cause a decline in nutrition immediately after picking. Fresh-picked produce is better for us, and tastes so much better too.
Reap the Benefits of a Kitchen Garden
by Maggie Oster
The 18th-century culinary expert Brilliat-Savarin wrote, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are." For 21st-century Americans that means we are an overweight people short on time, with little knowledge of what really good food tastes like, up to our gills in fats and additives, and walking time bombs for major illnesses. The solution to this is incredibly simple: choose a plant-rich diet.
Walter Willett, chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, has written, "A diet rich in fruits and vegetables can decrease the chances of having a heart attack or stroke; lower blood pressure; help you avoid constipation; guard against two common aging-related eye diseases -- cataracts and macular degeneration; help you feel full with fewer calories; add variety to your diet; and enliven your plate." There is also strong evidence that fruits and vegetables may help prevent certain cancers... --National Gardening Association article