The Home Gardening Project Foundation
(text-only version of all pages)
email us at: hgpf@teleport.com
This site was last updated on 1/8/02
©1996 The Home Gardening Project Foundation
http://home.teleport.com/~hgpf
A non-profit foundation dedicated to giving
free vegetable gardens to people in need
Sections:
Mission Statement
History and Future
of The Home Gardening Project Foundation
How You can Help Fund This Work
The Theory of Giving Away
Gardens
How the Gardens
are Built
The Home Gardening Project Foundation practices community
preventive medicine through the distribution of complete raised-bed vegetable
gardens for the aged, the disabled, single-parent mothers and large families.
The participants receive, at no cost to them, a complete vegetable garden
installed at their home. The gardens consist of one, two or three 5'x8'
soil-frames, made from 2"x8" boards, filled with weed-free organic
soil, as well as seeds, starts, fertilizer, instructions, a trellis, tomato
cages, a cookbook, monitoring, a newsletter, gardening advice and a second-year
start-up program of seeds and starts. We build 150 new gardens a year in
Portland's disadvantaged neighborhoods, to the universal benefit of the
participants and the city in general.
Building upon this experience, the H.G.P.F. has expanded to become a
national foundation. Our goal is raising money for seed-grant funding to
20 new Projects in 20 new cities each year for the next 10 years. We turn
money into health and joy; we build vegetable gardens for our mothers and
sisters, our fathers and our children. If you would like to make a contribution
to this work, please go to the Funding page for details.
The
History and the Future
of the Home Gardening Project Foundation
UPDATE: As of the fall of '98 we have twelve new garden
building organizations operating in places like Boston, Austin, Arcata,
CA and Spruce Pine, NC. Currently we are trying to raise $335K to help fund
their expansion, and to fund 15 or 20 new outfits. Any money sent will be
turned into vegetable gardens. If you would like to help us start new projects,
giving gardens to the poor and the elderly, please go to the Funding
page for details.
Since its beginning, with a $5,000.00
grant from HUD in 1984, the Home Gardening Project has built 1382 new vegetable
gardens in the Portland, Oregon area. We built 21 gardens in the spring
of '84, 23 in '85, and in ever increasing numbers until our apogee in '95
of building 165 gardens during a ten week spring. In our final season in
Portland (1996), we built 112 new gardens and resupplied some 200 other
households with seeds, starts, manure and fertilizer. Our average budget
has been $82K per year, raised from charitable trusts and foundations.
In 1996, we decided to turn over the garden-building in Portland to
a young couple (now The Portland Garden Project) who wanted to carry on
the work there. Dan's arthritis, from too many wet seasons and too many
wheelbarrow loads of heavy rain-soaked soil, encouraged him to leave building
and pursue an idea he'd long been considering: to turn The Home Gardening
Project into a foundation with the goal of raising start-up money for new
garden projects across the country. Many people have begun projects, following
our example, but we have heard from many others for whom the task of getting
first-year funding has been too much. The Home Gardening Project Foundation
is raising that start-up money, and locating and training new garden builders.
They will receive a first-year grant from the HGP Foundation, and the second
year a matching grant, to start them off raising money locally for their
future efforts.
Over the past years some 25 to 30 other Projects have
started in other cities: Olympia, Eugene, Sacramento, L.A., Denver, Tallahassee,
Brooklyn, Detroit, Chicago, Austin, Nova Scotia, and other cities; and our
sterling reputation continues to increase. We've been nominated as a Point
of Light, won the second annual Garden Grow Award (the first went to Robert
Rodale), received recognition from Renew America for environmental sustainability,
received the "Best Social Invention Award" from The Institute
for Social Inventions in London. News of the Project has appeared in National
Geographic, Organic Gardening Magazine, Utne Reader, The Sun, Der Plunkt,
and a wide variety of other periodicals and newspapers including The Congressional
Record.
In its September 1997 issue, the Smithsonian
Magazine devoted a feature article to our work.
The current effort of the Home Gardening
Project Foundation is to gather enough money to seed new H.G.Projects in
200 cities over the next ten years. If you would like to help us start new
projects, giving gardens to the poor and the elderly, please see the section
below entitled Funding.
Send money, we'll turn it into new vegetable gardens for
people who are in need or who reside in caring institutions. The money will
be used to start-up new Projects in new cities. The average cost of each
garden is $400, which is easily produced in first year crops.Theirs is providence
gained thereafter.
Your contributions are tax-deductible,
since The Home Gardening Project is a tax-exempt charitable organization
(501c3), recognized by the IRS (USA only).
Please send contributions to:
Dan A. Barker - Director
Home Gardening Project Foundation
8060 Upper Applegate Rd.
Jacksonville, OR 97530 USA
The Theory of Giving Away Gardens
Equally predicated on the miracle of the seed and abiding
compassion, and knowing that each one of us is interconnected and interdependent
and may at some time find ourselves in need of a way to practice better
health, nutrition and self-reliance - we deliver complete raised bed vegetable
gardens to people in need.
Abundance is provided by the seed. The place to grow it is provided
by the service of a willing worker and the community largess. People prefer
to take care of themselves as much as possible, but when there isn't enough
money or physical strength to continue gardening in the old way, we provide
them with a superior means to provide for themselves.
Raised-bed vegetable gardens are easy to plant, easy to maintain, easy
to manage and are highly productive. People who take just a little care
of their gardens find that they can raise enough produce to fulfill their
vegetable needs for the whole growing season. Thus their health is improved,
their happiness too, as well as their neighbor's and the neighborhood's.
A new
vegetable garden is a real change in the real world.
(corresponding photos are on the Building page)
At the project storage site, organic, weed-free soil is
loaded into the pickup with a front-end loader. Next will be the lumber
(foreground) for building the raised beds, then 2x2's for the trellis, stakes
to anchor each bed to the earth, and tomato cages, string, seeds, starts,
wheelbarrow and shovels. When they drive off, they'll have a complete vegetable
garden on the back of the truck.
After several seasons, we were able to add a great
labor-saving device to the truck: the hydraulic dump bed. With the dump
bed, we were able to build four gardens a day instead of two. Metal "wings"
at the tailgate of the bed channel the heavy soil into a waiting wheelbarrow.
Most gardens go into the back yard, so the person with the wheelbarrow may
have to deal with steps, slippery mudholes, junker cars, chained dogs, and
narrow sagging gates. It takes 18 wheelbarrow loads to fill three beds,
each 5 feet by 8 feet.
Here is the finished garden, ready for the garden
project participant to plant. The gift of a garden should have a finished
appearance and show that care has been taken to build it well. Each frame
is nailed together, then moved to be "square with the world"---lined
up with the other frames, all the same distance apart, and lined up square
with the nearest building or fence. After the beds are filled with soil
each one is raked smooth, and soil swept off the top of the boards.
If you'd like to take a look at the photos that accompanied these topics, click here to return to our Home Page.
email us at: hgpf@teleport.com
This site is maintained by Cynthia
Cheney
and was last updated on 1/8/02
©1996 The Home Gardening Project Foundation
http://home.teleport.com/~hgpf