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Louisville’s Limerick Community Garden faces funding uncertainty after city budget cuts.Other local gardens, including the Old Louisville Community Garden, also struggle with funding for maintenance and resources.While one garden expanded through a sponsorship, the Limerick garden seeks grants for improvements like a greenhouse and accessible beds.The garden addresses food insecurity in the neighborhood, especially after the closure of a local Kroger and the Zero Hunger Mobile Market.
In Louisville’s historic Limerick neighborhood, where access to fresh food is limited and a significant portion of households are without a vehicle, a grassroots gardening effort attempting to make a difference is now facing uncertainty as budget cuts have left them seeking ways to stay afloat.
The Limerick Community Garden helps residents bridge the food gap by growing healthy produce and distributing it directly to the community at the bi-weekly Old Louisville Farmers Market, but its leaders are now seeking out alternative funding sources after city budget cuts in recent years could leave them with few resources.
“We didn’t have a whole lot of time to organize and get the funding other than dig into our budget as a neighborhood association,” Limerick Neighborhood Association President Derrick Pedolzky said.
The Limerick garden is not alone with its financial struggles. The Old Louisville Community Garden is also looking to fund raise to replace some of the boards of the garden beds and purchase a weed whacker, chairperson Jean Christensen said, as well as address recent damages and theft. The Brook Street space, managed by the Old Louisville Neighborhood Council, is also considering increasing fees for next year due to a rise in costs by the water company.
“You’re impacting the people that are actually living here, and that’s what this is really all about,” Pedolzky said.
One garden, the Shelby Park Community Garden, was able to expand recently, but only thanks to a sponsorship from Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Organizers successfully tripled their gardening space with the installation of a new 130 foot-long planting strip around the garden and added ten beds for the 2025 season.
Local groups scramble to find funding
Like several community gardens across Louisville, the Limerick garden lost a large amount of funding in 2024 due to steep cuts made at the Jefferson County Extension Office as part of Mayor Craig Greenberg’s FY2025 budget proposal.
At the time, Greenberg suggested the office be allotted $30,000, a significant decrease from the $335,000 initially requested by the office. Leaders expressed deep concerns about the proposal, which would have deeply impacted several programs, including community garden initiatives, where they typically invested at least $60,000 each year.
The department later received more than $182,000 as part of the finalized city budget.
Catherine Shake, chair of the local extension district board, said the office has received slightly more funding in 2025, but management of the community gardens is a large responsibility in Louisville due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
“They did not have an interest in us continuing to support the community gardens,” Shake said. “This year’s budget, they gave us $250,000, which is great, which is more than a lot of third-party organizations got and I’m very appreciative for it, but I’m still $40,000 short. It just breaks my heart that Jefferson County, who has a budget surplus, has cut our budget to the point where the community is impacted.”
The extension office managed the gardens through October 2024 before outside organizations like Catholic Charities of Louisville and the Limerick Neighborhood Association took control, but the office continues to do extension programming for the community spaces by offering family consumer science training, a SNAP education program and providing seeds for planting to the gardens.
But as neighborhood associations take over the gardens, leaders are being forced to seek out other funding avenues to preserve the spaces. Pedolzky and Limerick Neighborhood Association Secretary Kim Nye said they are applying for grants through the KFC Foundation’s Kentucky Fried Wishes grant for a new greenhouse and Epic Gardening to fund wheelchair-accessible garden beds.
More than just a garden for the community
Garden Manager Frank McFall similarly said the produce grown in the garden is “making it to the community,” which lacks grocery options after the closure of a Kroger on Third Street in 2017 as well as the company’s recent announcement to close the Zero Hunger Mobile Market. The Kentucky State Data Center’s profile of the Old Louisville and Limerick neighborhoods also says 30% of households in the areas do not have a car.
Pedolzky said the garden is a way to foster community in a dense, urban setting and that many garden members view the space as “a home away from home.” McFall, who says the space is “of worthwhile and saving” and has participated for six years, says it makes him happy to see first time gardeners, like Nye’s son, thrive while learning a new skill and make the space their own.
Nye said more experienced members are willing to help her and others when they need help or have questions.
“We have several that have gardened all their life, and they are so free with their advice,” she said. “We want everyone to succeed.”
Reach Marina Johnson at Marina.Johnson@courier-journal.com.
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