Community Gardens

Community Gardens are spaces individuals can rent for the growing season to plant vegetables and flowers for their own use. In Rhode Island, nonprofits have organized Community Gardens all over the place, including in vacant lots and church lawns. Sometimes a group of neighbors work with city officials to create Community Gardens in part of a park or other publicly owned land. In the case of the West End Community Garden at Westminster & Bridgham in Providence, the garden organizers in 2007 worked with the business that owns the land. The possibilities are many!

Urban Agriculture (UA), as defined by the United Nations Development Program in 1996, is "'an activity that produces, processes, and markets food and other products, on land and water in urban and peri-urban areas, applying intensive production methods, and (re)using natural resources and urban wastes, to yield a diversity of crops and livestock.'"