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
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
Supporting the Home Gardening Project Foundation
While building 1400+ gardens in the Portland (OR) area, we received hundreds of inquiries from people who wanted to start similar projects in their communities. With help and advice from us, some were successful, but many others were not able to get the small amount of funding needed to begin. Because they had no local track record, funding agencies were reluctant to give them grants. Our mission, now that we are no longer building gardens ourselves, is to fill this need: to raise money to give start-up grants, as well as training, to new garden-builders. We have helped get garden projects started around the country, including Boston, Tallahassee, Olympia (WA), Flint (MI), •••LIST OTHERS •••.
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.
We also provide help and training, at no cost, to those who can use the resources of an existing agency, church, or other organization and get started without funding from us.
Hundreds of new Home Gardening Projects have risen throughout the country and the world. 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; i.e. 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 (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 simply take the idea and run with it until the money evaporates; for example, the group that built 1000 gardens in Bangladesh.
Giving away vegetable gardens is simply genuine beneficence. The benefits resonate at every level of society. Their costs are minimal, but their yields 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.
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 provide top-quality soil 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.
As Richard Doss, the initiator of the Kitchen Garden Project astutely noted, “It’s not farming. It’s vegetable gardening.” It is a way to return people to their basic self reliance, improve their health, and aid in social preventative medicine. That governments and contributing foundations could demonstrate their civil parsimony by shuffling the elders into diminishing subsistence is plainly criminal. That there is a swelling movement of people willing and waiting to pick up the shovel in order to change the world is plainly magnificent.
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 wherein if you need a vegetable garden someone will come to build it for you. We, the most of us, all get old and our bodies fail us. Vegetable gardens help defray that suffering.
All contributions will be dedicated to the support of new or existing garden-building work.
The Home Gardening Project Foundation is an official tax-exempt 501c3 nonprofit organization, and if you live in the US your contributions are tax-exempt.
Please send contributions to:
Dan A. Barker, Director
The Home Gardening Project Foundation
8060 Upper Applegate Rd.
Jacksonville, Oregon 97530
USA 541-899-1114
© 2005 The Home Gardening Projeect Foundation. Last updated September 2005.
