The members of the Riverside Community Garden (RCG) propose to the City of Wichita to create a model community garden in a corner of Wichita’s central city park system. This will, we believe, contribute to the contemporaneity and vitality of Wichita’s distinguished heritage of urban greenspace. We make this optimistic proposal from an experience of four years of neighborhood gardening which produced blessings so much richer than our initial ambition to grow fresh vegetables for our individual tables that we now dare to dream big.
A group of neighborhood residents established the garden in 2016 on a privately owned vacant lot in Riverside. We outfitted it with our own substantial donations of personal funds and donations from local businesses. The latter included lumber and hardware to build the raised beds. Cornejo & Sons gave the dirt for the beds. Johnson’s Garden Center gave plants for a pollinator garden in the front easement. Subaru donated and built a garden shed. Neighbors and friends donated their labor to construct the original twenty-seven garden beds even though not all of these volunteers ultimately rented a garden box. Local plumbers installed the garden’s water pump with a backflow meter at no cost.
Our first growing season in 2017 attracted community youth and creator groups to contribute to our enterprise. MakeICT built a free-standing library box for the garden. Girl Scout Troop 40236 painted the library box, installed a sink, and built a pyramid-shaped free-standing herb garden. In 2020 a boy scout designed and built a large decorative pergola for the garden as his Eagle Scout project.
During the summer, our gardeners organized festive family get-togethers such as an ice cream social that employed local vendors. Our little garden became a pocket magnet for enterprise, ingenuity, and generosity.
One of the garden’s next-door neighbors initially feared that our garden would negatively impact his peace and security. Long before we left in 2021, he became an enthusiastic convert to the benefits of a community garden. From his front row seat on his porch swing, he viewed cooperative, constructive activities and chatted with pleasant, interesting people. He said the garden’s proximity boosted his property’s value. More than before, folks in the neighborhood regularly walked their dogs and pushed their children in strollers by the garden to see what was new, to admire plant growth, to be amazed by sudden natural spectacles such as the arrival of swarms of butterflies around the fall-flowering succulents. Our garden drew people out of their individual houses and into a friendly public aura of neighbors and sidewalks.
In 2021 the landowner who had loaned us the use of his property for a communal garden decided that he was ready to take it back for personal use. So RCG had to fold the operation, look for a new site and start again, or quit. To help us make this decision we asked the guidance of the Sedgwick County Master Gardeners. This group included us in a Wichita garden tour which introduced us to several
fascinating local perspectives upon community gardens. We visited a decades-old garden governed by a religious order and supervised by a paid, full-time gardener. This operation accommodated individuals and groups of gardeners, some new to this country, whose new (to us) vegetables and cultivation techniques dazzled by their fecundity. We visited community gardens like ours in varying stages of development, proving that the concept is growing in popularity in Wichita. And finally, our guide introduced us to an ambitious garden at the new Southeast High School where an inspirational teacher has developed an entire course and hands-on garden around teaching food/environmental sustainability.
Reflection upon our personal experience combined with exposure to these impressive local examples of expanding our food production cultural horizons and awakening young minds to the secrets of the natural world rekindled our joy in gardening and its relevance to sustaining life on earth.
The members of the Riverside Community Garden believe that this proposal can contribute significantly to the sustainability of community, of environment, and of the civic treasure of our park system.
Novelene Ross is a member of the Riverside Garden board of directors.
She can be reached at [email protected]