Friends of San Leandro Creek: Ed. Center - Community Garden Statement

San Leandro Watershed Education Center

Community Garden Statement

A garden can be a teaching tool, a food source, a sanctuary, and much more for an urban community. The San Leandro Watershed Education Center is committed to supporting an adjacent community garden as an integral component of its programs and displays.

Teaching Tool

Living in a city can create a sense of alienation from the natural world. Being surrounded by concrete and asphalt, buying plastic-wrapped vegetables at the grocery store, thinking of soil and dirt as things to be swept up and dusted away, it can be easy to forget where food comes from and to lose the wonder of watching a seedling push its way up through the ground in order to reach the light.

Children and adults who visit the Center will learn about the plants in the garden and the cycle of life that is constantly in motion. They will be able to plant seeds and harvest vegetables for themselves. Active compost bins will demonstrate to visitors how yard and garden waste is transformed into a valuable soil amendment instead of being buried in a landfill.

The garden will include raised beds with wide aisles in order to accommodate wheel chairs and people who have difficulty bending down. Other plots in the garden will be low to the ground and easily accessible to small children.

It is important that the Center's garden be maintained organically. The garden will be near the banks of San Leandro Creek, so it is unavoidable that some runoff from the garden will enter the creek. What reaches the watercourse must be as benign as possible, meaning no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers that could endanger the aquatic life or encourage eutrophication. In addition to considering the safety of the creek, the safety of the gardeners and the recipients of the harvest must be considered. Children should be safe to play and work and eat without fear.

The organic methods employed in the maintenance of the garden will be documented in brochures and/or interpretive signage. The Center's garden will be a place where other gardeners may learn how to make their plot of land more environmentally friendly.

A small green house will be used to propagate food and flower seedlings for placement in the garden. It will also be used to propagate native riparian species for transplant along the creek next to the Center and for distribution to interested creekside residents. The Center will strive to educate the public on the importance of properly maintaining creek banks in order to support riparian diversity and to maintain bank integrity.

Food Source

Most of the food grown in the Center's garden will be donated to the San Leandro Women's and Children's Shelter. This organization has a longstanding relationship with Friends of San Leandro Creek and fully supports the creation of the San Leandro Watershed Education and Training Center and Natural History Museum. Friends of San Leandro Creek believes that the best place that this fresh, clean, local produce could go would be to these women and children.

Sanctuary

Local community members, particularly those with no land of their own (including residents of nearby senior living facilities), will have the opportunity to garden at the Center. The Center's garden will be created and molded by the volunteers who tend to it. It may consist of vegetables, flowers, fruit trees, crops representative of a variety of cultures and ethnicities, plants that attract butterflies, or anything else that can be supported by San Leandro's climate. The garden will contain many places where a visitor may sit and enjoy their surroundings.

Many of the flowers grown in the garden will be distributed to local senior homes, in order to share the beauty that the volunteers have nurtured.