Perhaps you have a backyard garden.  Or even a front yard garden!

Decatur also has quite a few community gardens these days. Many of which have substantial waiting lists. There’s the famous Oakhurst Community Garden, but also the Scott Community Garden – located behind the Rec Center at 231 Sycamore St, the Sugar Creek Garden, the Refugee Family Services Farm, the Decatur High School Community Garden, and the Tanyard Community Garden – between Northern Ave and Peavine Creek.

So gardeners, we know you’re out there digging beds and spreading compost!  What fruits and vegetables are you planting (or planning on planting) this spring?  What grows well for you around here?  And what have you had trouble getting to grow?

Tanyard Community Garden photo courtesy of The Decatur Minute

Love it!  ZBA member Kyle Williams writes in about last night’s approval of a new community garden tucked behind Northern Ave and Oakland Street residences…

Last night the Zoning Board of Appeals approved plans for Tanyard Community Garden (see Agenda Item No. 1 on the…agenda materials). The proposed garden is a tremendous community-led initiative to create useable greenspace in city-owned stream buffer areas that will “build strong communities” as you highlight in your post from yesterday Are Environmentalists Just “Fiddling While Rome Burns?” Our approval might also be the first official action on the new Strategic Plan:

The Tanyard Community Garden is consistent with the goals outlined in the Strategic Plan under Goal #8, which recommends that the city develop a “necklace” of planted bicycle and pedestrian linkages connecting the major green spaces of the city. The connection of the various green spaces will result in multiple benefits: I) easier, safer and more aesthetically pleasing access to existing green space, 2) “new” green space on existing public land, and 3) traffic volume and speed reductions. The City believes that the project will promote a more healthy and active community.

Tanyard Community Garden comes on the heels of ZBA’s approval of Sugar Creek Garden and is part of a citywide effort to identify and create useable community greenspace in these pockets of flood, detention and stream buffer areas.

This morning the AJC profiles Decatur’s Sugar Creek Garden in an extensive article about the city’s burgeoning community gardens.

The slender finger of land alongside Sugar Creek, tucked away in Decatur’s southwest corner, is practically invisible from two nearby roads. Sugar Creek itself, with those concrete embankments engineers were so fond of during the 1960s, looks like an open gash.

A leaning, rusted sign post, maybe 30 years old, says “Warning Stay Out” which, to conventional eyes, appears like sound advice. But when Lindsey Mann first scanned this same Sugar Creek vista she saw a virtual Eden.

Nice piece.

The AJC’s Kristina Torres has a nice, little feature on DHS senior Anna Rose Gable and her efforts to start a community garden on an unused portion of school property at the corner of Commerce and E. Howard.

The article says plots are available for $65 each, but doesn’t give any contact info for those interested.  Anyone have that?

This could be great for those of us that would like to start a little vegetable garden, but are covered by a very dense tree canapy.