Community Garden Network in Jersey City
There are currently 23 community gardens located throughout Jersey City, each providing a space for residents to interact with and enjoy nature.
Unfortunately, that number is shrinking. Many of the city’s adopt-a-lots have been developed and there are fewer private properties available for urban gardening. But keep your eyes open! Speaking with landlords, homeowners and other community leaders may help unearth spaces that can become community gardens.
SJC has long been a partner to a gardening coalition, providing technical assistance on topics like composting and permaculture to gardeners to help maximize the productivity and sustainability of garden sites. Thank you Jersey City Gardening Coalition for helping us to discover and promote the community gardens in Jersey City!
The map below reflects the current distribution of community gardens - food growing + ornamentals. Not bad, but we need more of them!
CONTACT INFO for each garden can be found in the downloadable link here.
AND WELCOME ‘City Farm Share’ in Lafayette !
Get to know them better by visiting their website … more below -
“ Our mission at City Farm Share is to support community access to healthy food, wellness education and the creation of urban green spaces through material support and programming for gardens and gardeners.
We envision a diverse and connected group of vibrant edible green spaces that are a daily inspiration for the members of our rich and culturally diverse community. “
Goals
One of the goals of SJC's Good Food Now! initiative was to connect the people behind the emerging urban ag movement in Jersey City and to provide more opportunities for sharing information and resources. We hope that showcasing these gardens and highlighting a way to collect data will allow us to build a compelling overview of what's happening, what's working and not working, plus offer some meaningful metrics that inform SJC's educational outreach efforts.
Data Collection Tool For Gardeners
We encourage existing community garden members to create a free account on Farming Concrete and use the BARN TOOL INSTRUCTIONS for tracking your garden data and to provide specific details about the STORY of your garden! Most of the city's community gardens are already listed - let us know if we missed yours!
The use of this tool was made possible through Sustainable JC's relationship with Farming Concrete, developers of the tool, which is being deployed primarily in New York, through the Design Trust's Five Boro Farms project. Sustainable JC is expanding the use of this tool beyond NYC and into New Jersey through this Jersey City pilot.
Why is it important to monitor and keep accurate track of community garden data and parameters? Measurable indicators make it much easier to improve the gardens' impact and benefit to the community. Remember... you can't manage what you don't measure!
A more detailed explanation of why community garden data collection is important can be found here and by watching the following video.
Getting Started With The BARN TOOL
To participate in this project, please follow these steps:
STEP ONE: Go to farmingconcrete.org and register for a user account. Do not worry about the Five Borough reference, Jersey City has its own community garden circle already setup inside the BARN tool; after you've registered click on the BARN tab.
STEP TWO: Click on 'YOUR GARDENS' on the garden map menu in right hand margin, then start typing your garden name, which should bring you to your garden page, if it is listed. If you have logged in before, when you click on YOUR GARDENS, list of garden links you are affiliated with will appear at the bottom of the page (you can be affilited with more than one garden!).
STEP THREE: Just start entering information about your garden, to help tell us what is going on there, and the story of your garden, e.g., do you grow food? what food are you growing? do you have a composting system or a rain barrel, etc. If you don't see your garden list, use the form below to get in touch with the Project Leader.**IMPORTANT: A rough estimation of the square footage of the garden would be greatly appreciated, along with a description of the physical attributes of the garden, e.g., building structures, fences, perimeter, boundary shapes (See the Health & Social Date fields if you'd like to upload photos).
Final Word…
Gardens provide an incredible resource for collecting storm water, carbon sequestration, growing soil (through compost), and feeding members of the community. Sustainable community gardens can integrate no / low cost solutions like rainwater collection for irrigation and composting for enriching and treating the soil. If one of these urban oasis are in your neighborhood, seek it out!
This project is connected to two other SJC initiatives, the Green Infrastructure / Trees, Rain Gardens +ART Campaign and Community Composting project.
