Sanford Community Garden is a place where gardeners of all skills can come together and learn how to grow their own organics herbs and vegetables. Our membership includes use of the soil and tools in the shed for working their plots, as well as an invitation to our garden educational events, workshops, workdays, and social gatherings. We usually meet every second Saturday of the month, usually at 9:00 AM from October through June, and 8:00 AM from July through September, weather permitting. At these Second Saturday Workdays we work on projects, do a lot of perimeter weeding, enjoy a guest speaker or just the companionship of fellow gardeners. We have quarterly garden meetings as well, with date and times fluctuating.
A few of our requirements are that gardeners must either live or work in Sanford, use organic methods only, keep their plot well maintained, and attend meetings and some of our Saturday workdays. Even though our garden is now freshly built with concrete block beds, a new fence and 2500 sq. feet of new weed barrier cloth, there is always something to be done.
The rebuild of the garden was desperately needed due to the aging wood beds, the depleted soil, the warped fence that squirrels leaped through, and limited space. The city informed us a few years ago that they are intending for the garden to be under a lease agreement, which means that we would have room to grow but we would be responsible for our own insurance and water bills. So this expansion we did could potentially assist us in furthering our education goals, as well as provide space where we could do all sorts of creative garden worshops to help bring funds to the garden.
The rebuild was a giant effort largely from Lowes of Sanford, who chose us as their Hero’s Project for 2017 which, due to the hurricanes and months of debris storage in the park, was delayed many times, yet we persevered and completed the project in December 2017. We are very grateful to them as well as the Altamonte Springs Boy Scouts Troop 849 who used their fundraising, design planning and physical work to create all new irrigation that supplies all 48 of our beds.
A few of our upcoming projects for 2021 include building a larger compost system. We currently use compost tumblers but will be switching to a multi-bin system. This will allow for all of our gardeners to add to the compost, and will aid in the maintenance of composting. We hope to one day collaborate with local businesses to collect their green and brown scraps to add to our composting system. We will also be creating an educational pollinator garden area outside of our garden gates. This area will include a Little Free Library and several native pollinator plants and butterfly host plants. We will include educational signs so people can learn about these important plants.
So as you can see we have lots of plans for the future and we would love to have you come grow with us!