Green Spot

Grow something. What are you waiting for? As a human being, be it man or woman, knowing how to properly plant, grow, tend to and harvest is an essential piece of knowledge we should all have.

Here in Los Angeles, the Pedal Patch Community (PPC) helps not only bring the community together for poverty and hunger awareness programs, but generates -

“…sustainable communities one patch at a time through the application of urban agriculture.”

With over 6 acres of urban land for group and volunteer cultivation, PPC volunteers and workers that are supported through charitable donations help at risk youth, and neighbors in low-income neighborhoods tend to communal gardens and learn about how being social helps a plant, fruit or vegetable grow better.

If you have a lot of unused property and land ripe for crops, gardens and more, check out SharedEarth.com - you may be connected with someone willing to till your land and if you’re in the U.K., check out LandShare.net (or FarmLink if you’re in Ontario, Canada). The shared gardening community is slowly growing due to the social power of the internet, and even in metropolitan locations such as New York City, Chicago or Los Angeles, there’s Yards To Garden - which displays mapped listings of potential neighbors you can team with to revitalize yards and grow fruits and vegetables, and another called Sharing Backyards.

If you’re a young, aspiring farmer though (which is severely lacking - Farmers age 65+ currently outnumber those age 35 and below Sixty to One), there are programs in nearly every U.S. state to introduce farm work to up and coming workers looking for an agricultural shift in their lives. Hyper-Local production of garden vegetables and fruit could free up thousands of acres of farmland for other, more in-demand crops. Plus, the savings in transportation costs would be great too. A common snag in modern life is that the ones who want to grow gardens haven’t had access to land to do it. Websites like this will really help make that possible. So long as land owners know the squatter laws (primarily in the U.K.) and draw up simple liability protection contracts, social gardening can bring us all together and make our neighborhoods a better place to live in.

Community Garden in Inglewood - In Progress