Asheville senior gardeners who live in the Battery Park and Vanderbilt apartments are hard at work installing planters and other elements that will make up their new community garden on city-owned land at 33-35 Page Ave. A group of teens pitched in on June 7 to help with the effort.
Since she was a child, Susan Sides has had her fingers in the dirt, helping her mother with the family garden. That early experience had a profound impact, fostering a passion that continues to this day: Since its inception in 2009, Sides has worked as executive director and garden manager at the Lord’s Acre in […]
U Grow, a partnership between Bounty & Soul and Eat Smart Black Mountain, offers a hand-to-mouth approach to food security by encouraging families and individuals to grow their own food.
From the Get It! Guide: According to MANNA FoodBank’s 2014 Map the Meal Gap study, food insecurity affects 15.3 percent of Western North Carolina. But several local efforts are looking to stop hunger in WNC, bringing the battle to the fields, the pantries, the neighborhoods and even city hall.
From the Get It! Guide: It was midwinter of 2012, and most Asheville residents hadn’t yet turned their thoughts to ripe tomatoes and summer squash. But Essie Silvers and a handful of her neighbors had a mission to bring a farmers market to their food-insecure East Asheville community.
N.C. Community Garden Partners will hold their statewide conference in Asheville on Saturday, Oct. 25. Learn more about the conference and its speakers in our previews this week — starting with Randal Pfleger of Grass to Greens.
You may think the end of summer means a well-earned break from the fields and farms. But for community gardeners, both from WNC and across the state, autumn will be a time to share ideas and dream up innovations as they assemble for the N.C. Community Garden Partners conference, taking place on Saturday, Oct. 25, at UNC Asheville.
The Shiloh community celebrated their annual community garden potluck and summer celebration on Saturday, July 27. This year’s gathering was of particular significance to the community, as it marked the dedication of the garden’s new amphitheatre and outdoor kitchen.
A mosaic of city roof top gardens? Vacant lots that create jobs? A backyard garden for folks without backyards? It’s all part of the small-scale urban farm model many in Asheville are striving for — where every tiny space is being utilized.
Several community gardens across Western North Carolina have raised funds to install outdoor kitchens, allowing garden participants to cook and eat their meals onsite. Rather than just gardening and going home, a meeting and cooking space allows residents to bring more events, arts, music and plays into the garden — and enjoy a meal with their neighbors.
The Burton Street Community Peace Garden is filled with art installations, metal structures, canopies, reading nooks and tidy rows of vegetables. But this garden is known for growing something more than food — neighbors say this garden works to grow connections in a community with a history of being intersected.
In our new section, area growers discuss their gardens and growing projects. This week Willie Jones, an AmeriCorps VISTA with Western Carolina University’s Center for Service Learning and Food Security Partnership and founder of the Jackson County Glean Team, tells us about gleaning and how it can be used to combat food insecurity.
The WNC area is rich with community gardens of all sorts — from CSAs to donation gardens that grow for area food banks to education gardens for public schools. Xpress is working to compile a database of community gardens to help interested neighbors find and support these community efforts.
Our Farm & Garden section has returned to the pages of MX and will run from March to October. As in our inaugural year, we will be bringing you a weekly feature, as well as our gardening calendar that will provide a run-down of area events. But this year, we want to do more, and we’d like your help.
Three years ago, Robert White and his wife, Lucia Daugherty, sized up an abandoned baseball field at Pisgah View Apartments, the West Asheville public-housing complex they call home, and envisioned a beautiful communal green space. From that prodigious act of the imagination sprang the Pisgah View Community Peace Garden, which today teems with life.
