The People’s Portable Garden
900 South 200 West
I spent the morning, volunteering through Wasatch Community Gardens, helping put together the final pieces to the brand new People’s Portable Garden on the northeast corner of 900 South 200 West. This small, Central Community parcel is owned by the Redevelopment Agency of Salt Lake City. It’s zoned for General Commercial ( CG ) but has no plans for development yet, so two urban planning students from the University of Utah, Marianne Becnel and Lauren Brown, working together with Wasatch Community Gardens and the RDA worked out a lease to allow for a temporary community garden on the land. It’s setup with thirty-six 1.22 meter by 4.88 meter raised beds to hold the rented plots. The startup costs were about $12,000.
The lot will get plenty of sun despite the two small billboards on the east end. It’s right next to a Trax line so it will get plenty of local exposure, too. To the south, across a wide and busy 900 South, are two more vacant lots. Immediately to the north of the lot is a one story commercial building that spans the length of the parcel. Its south wall is a large, forrest green field of corrugated metal, empty except for a sign on the east side that reads “SIGNS” and a banner on the west side that reads “BANNERS.” It’s too bad they can’t put a mural up there instead. Even with the garden, the intersection still looks like a rather bleak, low-rent commercial corridor (which is what it is, really). It could use all the help it can get. Then again, any flagrantly blank wall in the city will always make me think of putting a mural on it.
There is no better use [for a city owned vacant lot] than to put it into local agriculture.
Mayor Ralph Becker
There was a good sized crowd of volunteers, from youth programs, a variety of volunteer programs like AmeriCorps, and a number of the people in the neighborhood who will be renting plots. I helped out with the build team who cranked out more than half of the beds before noon while the rest of the volunteers were levelling the land, placing the beds, filling them with soil, covering the ground with wood chips, and doing some minor landscaping on the periphery of the property. The mayor came by ( on his bicycle ) at the lunch break to participate in the first planting ceremony. He said some nice things about supporting urban agriculture which were nice to hear.
Lunch was much appreciated after our morning toil and we were entertained by a nice bluegrass band that included Wasatch Community Gardens’ volunteer coordinator, Brit Merrill. The organizers also gave out free t-shirts, seeds, and tomato plants to all the volunteers.
I didn’t hang out for too long after lunch but I did manage to talk with Marianne, Claire Uno, director of WCG, and Ashley from the RDA about what it took to make this project a reality, as well as what advice they might have for a similar project in Rose Park, where the empty lots are owned privately and the RDA isn’t involved in the area. They were very helpful and inspiring, though they all acknowledged, including the mayor, that funding is the biggest challenge.
Nonetheless, I’m even more excited now about my ideas for the vacant lot on 900 North 900 West than I was before. So Monday I’m going to try to get in touch with Scott Steenblik from the Rose Park Community Garden and see if they have a waiting list for plots and what kind of outreach they’ve been doing. Depending on his answers, I might talk with the Quality Quik Stop owner to see how open he might be to a guaranteed three year lease. And depending on his answer, I’d then want to print up some fliers to see if I can drum up some interested neighbors.
From there, it would be about funding. I was thinking of some local sponsors. There’s a Smith’s grocery store nearby and an IHC clinic, too. I can’t be too sure how interested these businesses would be but this uncertainty wouldn’t stop me if I can get to this point.
CDBG also comes to mind but I have no clue how viable this kind of grant propsal might be since it’s rather small-scale, so who knows. I would love to try to integrate this into a year-round farmers market for the area and leverage that into further economic development if possible so that might be a good angle to approach it but it’s too difficult to know just now. Ashley did mention that they did a study on the viability of a year-round farmers market and it did appear to be viable, though I imagine that study was based on a year-round market instead of the seasonal one rather than on top of it. And honestly, I don’t know if Rose Park would be the best place for it. I just think the Rose Park/Fairpark areas are good neighborhoods that deserve more attention and economic development, especially as gentrification keeps pushing slowly westward.
All in all, the portable community garden concept has great potential to broaden interest in community gardening by making more unused land available without threatening long term commercial interests. And it’s the perfect model for what I’ve been hoping to accomplish in my neighborhood.