Photos from McRorie Community Garden in Gainesville

My husband and I took an over night trip to Gainseville over the weekend. Our friend artist, Celino Demitroff pointed us to the McRorie community garden just down the street from his apartment.

The small piece of land is densely packed with small garden plots which are available for free.

Gainesville is a different growing zone (8b) than Daytona (9a), and you can see the difference in the plants.  This tropic lemongrass looks very petite and manageable compared to plants in Daytona that are taller than I am.

The greens were flourishing in the cold.

Red Russian and Siberian Kale.  The Kales looked about like mine, maybe a bit larger.

But their cabbages and corn salad were huge.  Loved this cabbage.

I even saw something new.  The leaves of this plant look like eggplant.  It has thorns on the branches and leaves and fuzzy hairs on the orange fruits.  After a bit of searching I found this page on flickr, and I believe the plant is Naranjilla AKA Quito Orange AKA Golden Fruit of the Andes AKA Bed of Nails. The botanical name is Solanum quitoense.

Happy Birthday Fair Share and Birth of Lions Share Community Garden

Happy 2nd Birthday Fair Share and best wishes to Joel Tippens as he prepares to relocate Fair Share, his non profit entity to Cattanooga, Tennessee. I'm very happy that Joel will be in a community where he will be rewarded and sustained financially for his urban agriculture work. But I'm sad to see him go, and I'm sad that more of Daytona Beach was not willing or able to support his project.

Moira and I were there 2 years ago breaking ground to install the first raised beds. It's amazing to me that she doesn't even remember the first time she was at the garden. I love this picture that I found of the 3 of us taking a break in the archive...

Joel has "passed the shovel" on to us the remaining active gardeners. It's up to us to keep up the good work.

The future looks exciting from down here.

With lots of help from the college kids on Saturday, we got the water collection barrels aligned on level ground.

Our overflow pond was set in place.

And barrels were interconnected. Thanks for the design work Scott.

We even have a new name for the garden, The Lions Share Community Garden. You can follow our continuing adventures at the garden in our Flickr Group, Yahoo Group, or Facebook Group page.

"The Garden" Showing in Daytona Beach October 22nd. Save the date!

On Friday evening, October 22nd, Fair Share is presenting this powerful film to the community... event details coming soon.

This is the story of the 13 acre Los Angeles community garden.