Garden Bed of the Month – May Community Garden

Desert Meadows Park in Arizona: Community Garden Plots

Raised beds for community garden plots: Arizona Cooperative garden grows food in the desert with Durable GreenBeds

The heart of the park is a fenced-in garden area with dozens of raised irrigated plots where members of the Green Valley Gardeners grow colorful plants, including vegetables, many of which are donated to the Community Food Bank. In fact, the gardeners are so hard-core about keeping their hands in the dirt, even on blazing-hot summer days, that when some plot-holders leave town for the summer, they can keep their plots by allowing other gardeners to grow veggies there for the Food Bank. Last summer about 3,000 pounds of vegetables — a ton and a half — were donated to the Food Bank.

Arizona Desert Meadows Garden and Park is huge and well attended by many locals. I can’t tell you how many compliments and questions I’ve already fielded about our Durable Greenbeds! – Dave G.

And the raised gardens (made with Durable greenbed kits)  now have a waiting list, just a year or two after skeptics questioned whether they could even rent out all of the 30 plots built by teenagers from PPEP YouthBuild of Tucson, an AmeriCorps program. One of the new raised plots is in a metal tub that is narrow enough to accommodate a gardener on the waiting list who gets around on a scooter and thus cannot reach across a wide plot.