A Community Pulls Together to Save a Garden

🍋 Lemon Camp: September 17 and 24Grow a healthy, productive lemon tree in a pot. In these two live online sessions, Steven Biggs covers watering, feeding, pruning, repotting, pests, flowers and fruit—and how to get a lemon tree through the winter.Recordings are included, so you can watch afterwards if you can’t attend live.Learn more and register for Lemon Camp- - - We chat with Nathan Larson, Director of the Cultivate Health Initiative in Madison, Wisconsin.When we visited Madison in summer 2019 to attend the National Children and Youth Gardening Symposium, Larson gave us a tour of a wonderful community garden—the Troy Community Garden.There are currently about 100 families growing food there…although at one point it looked as if the land on which the garden stands would be sold off for a housing development. Larson talks about how people and groups pulled together to find a way to save the space.The plot of land was reimagined to include community garden plots, an urban farm with a CSA, a kids garden, some housing, a tall-grass prairie restoration project, and a food forest.When we visited the Troy Community Garden, we were struck by signs for a “worm city” and the “mud pie kitchen.” Larson is passionate about garden-based education.The garden now includes a pizza oven that is used for weekly nights, along with music.