Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast. Hopefully you're out in the garden right now, chilling, relaxing, listening to this episode with both myself and the one and only farmer Nick.

This is our last episode for now with Nick, who is a plant coach and urban farmer community gardener. He actually has a newsletter that he started during the pandemic called the growing green newsletter, which you should definitely check out on the podcast description.

But you're on every platform to Nick, TikTok, Instagram. Do you have a YouTube channel yet? I feel like you should.

I've been debating that YouTube channel. I know we've talked about it personally, but I'm on TikTok, Instagram, and I got a couple of YouTube things coming soon.

When you have one, you're going to have to let me know because obviously I'm obsessed with YouTube. So I am a big proponent, but we're not talking about that today. We're talking about community gardens, why they're important. I think we all listening intuitively. We can understand why, but you know, Nick's got some interesting stuff to share on on community gardens. And I'm curious actually Nick, how much have you done in that world?

So it's funny. I joined a community garden back in 2016 in New York City. And it was a small garden didn't have a ton of membership, but for the folks who were there, it was it meant the world to them to have a green space of their own in a very urban New York City neighborhood.

And at the time, you know, I'm thinking, okay, this is cool. This is great. You know, so many people can come in. They can grow. They can do these things. But this was in a more well to do neighborhood.

And as I started learning more about the scene here in New York City and also in other areas of LA, you realize that these community gardens aren't just for an escape and an oasis, but they are an area where people truly can grow food.

And in an area where you might not have a grocery store within two miles, which is a lot if you're living in a city like New York City, this can be your only source of produce and vegetables that you're getting on a daily basis.

And I got really involved in that scene and started working with fish cars on an initiative called project orange thumb. And they came to me and they said, Nick, you know, we would really like you to help us identify gardens in LA, New York, Atlanta and St. Louis that are deserving of this grants $10,000 for each of these gardens, which goes a whole long way.

And I said, you know, I'm game, let's go. And I found some amazing gardens, the one in LA, Alma backyard farms, they have specific programs geared towards teaching previously incarcerated individuals how to garden and get back into the workforce. St. Louis, it's a rooftop farm in the heart of the city that's distributing food and donating food during the pandemic to communities of color in New York, one of my favorite community gardens on the planet.

Oco farms, it's an aquaponics farm in Brooklyn. Nice. I like that. Next time you're here, you got to come visit yummy. Their founder is unbelievable. But when you see this closed loop system with tilapia swimming next to the crops, it's unbelievable. And then Atlanta, we have a food forest that is literally very wild and has tons of different fruit trees and things grown there. So to see the diversity of these types of gardens and the creativity and ingenuity.

In which they grow is so inspiring and they have to be that way because to grow in these spaces and to deal with the high rent prices and all these other factors that you have in an urban environment are very, very challenging.

And when you realize that you can produce like a hundred, I think the stat is you can produce 160 pounds of food in a raised bed no bigger than the ones that you're growing. I mean, I don't have to tell you how much food you can grow in a small raised bed, but truth to know that there are kids learning how to grow and families who are getting fresh produce because of these programs.

I think it is truly outstanding and it's something that the casual community garden member might not realize themselves.

Yeah, it is interesting because the standard I guess community garden you think of is I was a nice place to have a hobby, right? And I'm already doing fine.

And I just sort of need a mental break or whatever, whatever sort of other benefits to gardening there are in there are many.

But for a lot of people, it is like you're saying the only way they're going to get either produce at all or maybe specific produce that's like important to their heritage, right?

And so there's a lot of interesting approaches to it and kind of calling back to what you're saying a couple episodes ago where you don't really know the impact sometimes of like what you're creating.

It's really that with community gardens. You'll get stories from people who, you know, maybe were in situations where they were wanting to not be alive anymore.

So there's just really wild situations that you'll hear about.

And you're like, wow, there's so much more to this than just, okay, I have a four by four plot that I can grow some potatoes in.

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