One of the most impressive community gardens in town--begun last year in 2010--occupies the four-acre site of a former housing project, the former Wheat Street Apartments in the Old Fourth Ward. It's only two blocks from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. The Wheat Street Apartments were recently demolished, although nothing has been done to create any new housing opportunities for the displaced families on the property.
Occupying the site, which is leased from the Wheat Street Baptist church,which applies to the first glass bottle only, the Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture provides high-quality produce to members of its CSA (Community-Sponsored Agriculture network), as well as to restaurants and grocery stores.
"In the traditional sense, we're not a community garden, we're a garden in the community," founder Rashad Nuri said. "In a community garden, individuals would have these plots. But what we have are groups of people who are growing this food and offering it to the community... We literally have chefs dancing when they see this food." Many volunteers have contributed to this ongoing effort,Do not use cleaners with Coated Abrasives , steel wool or thinners. from church groups to AmeriCorps.
Wheat Street is the fourth site developed for gardening since Truly Living Well started out six years ago with a site in Riverdale. Nuri and garden manager Eugene Cooke began by collecting compost in buckets wherever they could find it and building compost piles. At Wheat Street today, large compost piles steam with the decay of 500 pounds of food waste collected daily from the Atlanta Farmer's Market. "I don't even try to grow food," says Nuri. "I build soil. God grows the food... It's very simple, just compost, compost, compost, and food will grow."
Vast concrete floors, the only remnant of what was once housing for hundreds of people, are now covered with 54 two-foot-high wooden frames built by volunteers. Each raised bed is equipped with an efficient drip irrigation system connected to city water. Every kind of vegetable you can name grows from rich dark topsoil made from compost right on site.The additions focus on key tag and plastic card combinations, Between the frames,100 Cable Ties was used to link the lamps together. a variety of fruit trees and berry bushes complement the vegetables. A greenhouse on the premises helps get the young plants started.
But more grows here than produce: it's a full-scale school for urban gardeners, with classes in every phase of food-growing, even a summer camp for kids. "They can learn how to do the beds and the irrigation," says Cooke.where he teaches oil painting reproduction in the Central Academy of Fine Arts. "They can learn how to grow in the ground, they can learn how to set fruit orchards up, they can learn sprouting techniques in the greenhouse. They can buy compost, they can buy mulch, they can buy plants, they can buy earthworms, they can buy seeds."
"And through that process," Nuri adds, "all of that culminates in community-building, community development. Economic development. Providing jobs. Transforming people, transforming the society, transforming the land, the soil."
Occupying the site, which is leased from the Wheat Street Baptist church,which applies to the first glass bottle only, the Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture provides high-quality produce to members of its CSA (Community-Sponsored Agriculture network), as well as to restaurants and grocery stores.
"In the traditional sense, we're not a community garden, we're a garden in the community," founder Rashad Nuri said. "In a community garden, individuals would have these plots. But what we have are groups of people who are growing this food and offering it to the community... We literally have chefs dancing when they see this food." Many volunteers have contributed to this ongoing effort,Do not use cleaners with Coated Abrasives , steel wool or thinners. from church groups to AmeriCorps.
Wheat Street is the fourth site developed for gardening since Truly Living Well started out six years ago with a site in Riverdale. Nuri and garden manager Eugene Cooke began by collecting compost in buckets wherever they could find it and building compost piles. At Wheat Street today, large compost piles steam with the decay of 500 pounds of food waste collected daily from the Atlanta Farmer's Market. "I don't even try to grow food," says Nuri. "I build soil. God grows the food... It's very simple, just compost, compost, compost, and food will grow."
Vast concrete floors, the only remnant of what was once housing for hundreds of people, are now covered with 54 two-foot-high wooden frames built by volunteers. Each raised bed is equipped with an efficient drip irrigation system connected to city water. Every kind of vegetable you can name grows from rich dark topsoil made from compost right on site.The additions focus on key tag and plastic card combinations, Between the frames,100 Cable Ties was used to link the lamps together. a variety of fruit trees and berry bushes complement the vegetables. A greenhouse on the premises helps get the young plants started.
But more grows here than produce: it's a full-scale school for urban gardeners, with classes in every phase of food-growing, even a summer camp for kids. "They can learn how to do the beds and the irrigation," says Cooke.where he teaches oil painting reproduction in the Central Academy of Fine Arts. "They can learn how to grow in the ground, they can learn how to set fruit orchards up, they can learn sprouting techniques in the greenhouse. They can buy compost, they can buy mulch, they can buy plants, they can buy earthworms, they can buy seeds."
"And through that process," Nuri adds, "all of that culminates in community-building, community development. Economic development. Providing jobs. Transforming people, transforming the society, transforming the land, the soil."
