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Politics & Government

Growing A Community: Garden Will Benefit Many

Leggett was on hand to help dedicate the Emory Grove land for use as a community garden.

Last year, the Rev. Tim Warner heard that his Salvadoran neighbors who were planting vegetables in their front yards and the front of their apartment buildings were having trouble with their homeowners' associations in Emory Grove.

If you're from Guatemala or El Salvador and "you have 10 square feet of land, you grow food on it," Warner said. "It makes good sense right? [In the United States] it's got to be a nice perfectly green lawn that's fertilized and killing the environment, with pretty flowers, but you don't plant [food] in your front yard."

Warner, who works in County Executive Isiah Leggett's Office of Community Partnerships, had the idea for a community garden, and approached the county Parks Department, its Community Gardens Program now spanning 11 garden sites serving more than 600 families, according to the department's Horticultural Services Division chief David Vismara.

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The result is a 50-plot community garden in Emory Grove that broke ground on Saturday, with Leggett in attendance as part of the county's celebration of April as Earth Month.

"In just a few weeks, what we'll see here is a beautiful green mountain of our collective creativity, our commitment to honor the Earth and support this community ... in a way that benefits us all," Leggett said.

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The garden is situated behind a Montgomery County Public Schools administrative building on Washington Grove Lane, just northeast of Gaithersburg's city limits. MCPS owns this land, along with several other empty parcels of land that it may develop school buildings on in the future.

Originally, Warner had selected a different, nearby parcel of land as the site for the garden, but Vismara said MCPS came forward and offered up three plots for the community gardens program. Fortunately, one of them, the new site, happened to be near Warner's first choice, but it was much larger.

Each plot in the garden will go to a family, with many plots going to families sponsored by several community groups. Vismara said he was surprised by that, as normally families are selected by the parks department by lottery.

"I was interested to hear today that a lot of these individuals are associated with different community groups, and so that makes this garden even more worthwhile that we're now going to be touching 50 families but with each one of these plots we may be touching more than one plot owner," Vismara said.

One of these groups, Neighbors 4 Neighbors, is Gaithersburg's local chapter of Warner's Neighbor Opportunity Network, an organization he started about two years after he brought together groups of different religious faiths to discuss causes common to each of them, namely fighting poverty in the county.

Warner's group, at first called the Neighbor Campaign, began knocking on doors in several neighborhoods in the county where the poverty was the worst, one of them being Emory Grove. The group had two goals: to inform the county's poor citizens about services available to them based on their needs and to connect neighbors together so they could help each other.

When people decided they wanted to meet every week, Neighbors 4 Neighbors, which now meets every Thursday evening at 6, was born.

The Emory Grove garden is just the latest achievement in Neighbors 4 Neighbors' effort to build a supportive community.

"We are all about community," Warner said. "A community garden is great place to begin building community. When you share labor together, you build relationships of trust with each other."

At the groundbreaking ceremony April 9, Neighbors 4 Neighbors had a table with fliers advertising county services for the poor such as childcare and medical care. It is part of the group's mission not just to help each other but to inform, because they have found many people simply don't know about help that is already readily available to them, leader Carolyn Camacho says.

"We are there for mutual support," member Georgia Rosales said. "If you know of anything that maybe I eventually will need or do need, then that's where we go and exchange ideas, resources and give each other help."

The community gardens program began almost three years ago after County Councilmember Valerie Ervin approached the parks department with the idea. The program started in Takoma Park and was quickly a popular success. Vismara says that there will be as many gardens as the department's budget allows; there doesn't seem to be a shortage of demand.

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