This year, Gardening Know How's School and Community Garden Sponsorship Program was fortunate enough to help support 20 gardens with $1,000 each. These gardens represent a wide array of community and school programs, from Florida to Saskatchewan and many places in between. Each has its own unique and powerful story, and we're excited to share them with you. Every other week we highlight one of our sponsorship recipients to help spread the word about how amazing they really are. This week we're featuring the Auburn University Community Garden.
Founded in 1970, the AUCG has been working for almost 50 years to help fight food insecurity and malnutrition in Alabama. In its 2.5 acres of space, it supports over 80 individual plots, which it rents out on a yearly basis to Auburn community members who want to try their hand at gardening and farming. It also serves as a teaching space for entomology and agriculture classes at Auburn University, and has several plots dedicated to growing and donating produce to local charities.
While gardeners are free to work their own space, the AUCG staff offers a lot in the way of making their experience better, like crop recommendations, vacant plot maintenance, and soil preparation. It's that soil preparation that's the most time consuming"¦ or at least it has been. With Gardening Know How's sponsorship, the AUCG has been able to purchase a rear-tine tiller. This is what they had to say about it:
"Jeremiah DeVore, manager of the Auburn University Community Garden, is excited about the new rear tine tiller we were able to purchase thanks to a sponsorship from Gardening Know How! This tiller was a huge help in terminating winter cover crops and preparing plots for new members in time for the start of our garden season in March. The tiller has also been used to prepare the ground in pollinator plots that were sown with wildflower mixes to attract pollinators and beneficial insects. We will use it again soon before planting summer cover crops in our vacant plots, then again in early fall to terminate those before sowing winter cover crops. Thank you to Gardening Know How for their support of our organization!"
With the grant from Gardening Know How, the Auburn University Community Garden has been able to get started engaging the community and growing food to donate in record time. We're proud to be able to help them realize their dream.
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