Photo provided Westside Community Church volunteers prepare plots for gardening.
Grow some, share some.
That’s the premise behind Westside Community Church’s Share Garden, a relatively new venture that allows community members to have their own garden lot on the church’s grounds. Through a partnership with Love Chapel, produce grown in specially designated lots are shared with the chapel’s food pantry and those who utilize their services.
For a fee of $25 and by filling out an application found on the Share Garden’s Facebook page, community members receive their own lot or lots where they can plant whatever they like, from flowers to vegetables, Westside Community Church pastor of families Harvey Taylor said.
“We can’t grow trees or shrubs, no woody plants, no invasive plants,” Taylor said. “But any type of backyard garden crop is welcome.”
Twenty lots are available and an additional six lots are then dedicated to Love Chapel. In past years, these lots have been home to tomatoes, zucchini, bell peppers, sweet corn and cucumbers.
Each gardener is assigned one of the Love Chapel lots and, using the rental fee money, Westside buys plants for those lots. Community gardeners are also asked to help weed and take care of the lots, but the church’s junior high youth group also helps by doing the initial planting and harvesting those lots.
“… anything produced in those lots, we take directly over to the Love Chapel during the growing season and we encourage those who are growing out here maybe to take some of what they’re growing over to the Love Chapel as well,” Taylor said.
Gardeners can start working in the Share Garden as early as March 1 and are asked to clean up on Oct. 31. The lots are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Since the garden’s start about two years ago, Taylor said they have had a handful of participants each year. They have room to double their capacity, but he said they need to fill these lots first before they till more. Those wanting to participate in the Share Garden do not have to be members of Westside Community Church to rent a lot.
“We actually want the majority of our participants to not be members of the church because this is a community outreach, not an internal project,” Taylor said. “So we really are looking to provide this space and opportunity to the community outside of ourselves and for it to benefit the Love Chapel and the community outside of ourselves.”
Taylor said the idea to start the Share Garden came from a member of their congregation, and the idea to partner with Love Chapel with the garden came from Westside Community Church’s already longstanding ministry and mission partnership with the nonprofit.
Love Chapel was also able to secure a Cummins community benefit grant to help fund materials, soil amendments and gardening tools, in addition to providing three different employee volunteer groups that helped them improve the soil and construct the garden’s water capture system, he said.
“We have done some amendments to the soil to try and improve the soil quality out there and we’ve set up a rain water collection system to our building’s downspouts on the side of the building where the garden is… so we’re using some food grade containers to collect the water,” Taylor said. “We had the capacity to gather up about 1,600 gallons of water to irrigate with because we don’t have city water or anything.”
Love Chapel executive director Kelly Daugherty said they love the idea of the Share Garden as fresh produce and vegetables are the hardest items for them to keep stocked. This will be the first full season of the Share Garden as well, as the garden started a little later in the summer last year and didn’t produce that big of a crop yield, he said.
“This is an opportunity where Love Chapel and our hungry neighbors can benefit from it while folks get the enjoyment of doing gardening,” Daugherty said. “We are super stoked that it’s going to be a full season of it this year.”
