Disscussion and Recommendations Old Landfill Site

The landfill site is a large area near a large population of people who have a need for community gardens. In this way it is the perfect site to place a new community garden. There are however several unique challenges which would come along with developing this site.

First of all the fact that this is an old landfill rules out the option of planting directly in the ground. This site is not contaminated to the point where people walking around on the surface would be at risk though. The solution that we propose to this problem is creating raised beds. This has been done in several other community garden sites in Burlington such as the Archibald St. Garden. This would make putting a garden in here more expensive but it would still be feasible.

The landfill site also has a large homeless camp in the adjacent site. Not involving the homeless population in putting in a garden here would make it very difficult to avoid conflict between gardeners and these people. We did some research on involving the homeless in Community gardens and it looks as though it has been done with success in several locations around the U.S. The specific example that we looked at was a homeless garden project in Santa Cruz, California. In this project 24 homeless gardeners were paid 6.75$ per hour (minimum wage) for 20-30 hours per week and ended up producing vegetables for local natural food stores, farmers markets, and local restaurants. This not only provided jobs but also "life skills for homeless people within the therapeutic context of an organic garden" (Starting a homeless garden). We do not propose such a large scale project but do think that this may have the potential to create a situation where both neighborhood gardeners and the homeless benefit. It could also be interesting for the city to look into this in order to get some of these homeless back into the workforce. For more information on this project go to the "Starting a Homeless Garden Project" website here http://www.nationalserviceresources.org/practices/17452.

Finally access has the potential to be a problem. Getting to this site requires a quarter mile walk down the bike path to reach it. Whether this is a problem depends on gardener's willingness to walk a little bit. This also may be difficult as far as putting in a water system. This problem is not unique to the landfill site though so perhaps coming up with a more broad ranging solution for getting water to these sites would be needed.