Wyoming’s half-acre community garden fosters full-grown sense of community
WYOMING, Ohio —
If you have succumbed to the procrastinating spirit that lives within some people and put off starting that vegetable garden you have always wanted, the city of Wyoming can offer some inspiration that might finally spur you to get with it.
On the east side of Van Roberts Place, parallel to train tracks that divide Wyoming from Lockland, you will find a half-acre patch that fosters a full-grown sense of community spirit.
It’s a garden of raised beds that could serve as a display model in a retail garden center.
A garden-focused group called the Community Garden Task Force was set up in 2016 and started to scour the country for best practice, design concept and a certain look.
The old community gardens had been demolished in order for a new bike trail to be installed, so finding fresh space became a community-wide need.
We gazed upon squash, grape tomatoes, raspberries and peppers among the 60 garden plots that are there.
Lois Griswold stops by twice a day every day to punch in the code, open the gate and start watering.
“There’s some people that work that can’t come and water their gardens,” she explained.
There are others who are raising children and cannot get to the community garden as frequently.
Griswold employs a loving attitude and motherly approach when watering the plants, noting the raised beds that can accommodate wheelchair-bound gardeners.
She was at onetime the team mother for the Boston Red Sox. She is now the maternal hand of garden watering in the city she embraces.
“Look at the green,” she enthused. “It’s just unbelievable. I could hardly believe that it was so beautiful.”
It is both beautiful and bountiful.
The 4-by-8-foot raised beds of garden soil were designed by Juliana Gardner of a shop called One Small Garden.
They are on clean crushed stone.
The layout is practical as well as aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
While we were there, L. R. Hunley was pokin’ around. He has four plots and makes hot sauces from scratch.
He showed us his Fresno peppers next to the tabasco peppers which will eventually go into his wing sauces.
He put the seeds in around late April and now the vibrant peppery color of late August appear tantalizing.
His kitchen cuts from the garden daily. Local, from the ground ingredients become a mouth-watering part of Tela, his restaurant on Springfield Pike.
The table scraps are saved so they can be composted at the garden.
It’s a hands-on, full circle endeavor that has drawn in local students as well. Wyoming has partnered with its schools to foster a sense of community, composting, recycling and protecting Mother Earth.
Volunteers built the compost bins this summer spurred by a no-waste mindset and by Sarah Stankorb Taylor who proudly stated that by working together they’re making a difference.
“The waste at the landfill produces methane and greenhouse gas,” said Taylor. “Kept in the right balance that won’t happen here. So, we are impacting our carbon footprint for the whole community.”
The garden project cost was just shy of $138,000.
A $115,000 block grant through Hamilton County made it possible.
Vinyl fencing that encircle the beds keeps it possible.
“We have a robust deer population in Wyoming,” said Megan Statt Blake, the assistant community development director for Wyoming. “So, having the high fence enables folks to keep vegetables without the deer decimating their gardens.”
As we talked, a whistle blew and drowned out our conversation for a moment as a train passed.
The setting took on a quaint village-like moment amid the work bench, the tool shed, the water hoses and wooden compost bins.
In an age of deep division and polarized politics countrywide, the sense of community spirit fostered here took on a refreshing quality.
Dirt under the fingernails produces shared servings of restaurant vegetables, the scraps of which are returned to the bins to sustain a process that is in its own small way an earthly treasure.
“All sorts of good stuff,” said Blake, who agreed with the others that what they have restarted in Wyoming is doable in every community.
They want to plant the seed in your procrastinating head and trust that you will let it grow.
You can stop reading now and go get some garden gloves.
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