Tonight from 6 to 7:30 pm at Five Points Community Farm Market, there will be a discussion about community gardens in Norfolk.

There are existing community gardens in Norfolk with open plots. There are more community gardens on the way. If you’ve ever wanted to have your own little plot, if you want to engage in your community in a positive way, or if you want to actually see your food grow from the ground, you should attend. You will find answers there.

The need for a community garden in Downtown Norfolk is something I’ve written about here and here. I have far too many thoughts and images swirling through my mind right now to make this a coherent essay. Instead I will make a list, and I will call it this:

Pretty, eh? (Photo: dignityadvocate.wordpress.com)

Reasons Community Gardens Will Save Our Souls (If We Let Them)

1. Food tastes, at minimum, 4,000 times better when it has grown from a seed you planted.

2. Community gardens turn strangers into neighbors, neighbors into friends.

3. Community gardens beautify our city.

4. Empty Lots = Bad; Green Spaces = Safer Neighborhoods. According to this article, researchers at the University of Illinois “compared crime rates at 98 apartments in public housing developments in Chicago. They categorized apartments by the level of greenery around them. They found buildings with high levels of greenery had one-half as many crimes compared to buildings with low levels of greenery. Their research supports previous work that shows people who live in green surroundings experience less graffiti and littering as well.”

5. They transform communities. Eileen Gallagher, project manager for Philadelphia Green, said about a Philly garden: “This community went from being one of the most drug- and crime-plagued locations in the city where people were afraid to even leave their homes, to a beautiful, safe neighborhood filled with trees, gardens, playgrounds, cultural events, and pride.”

6. When you know how to live off the land, no matter what is taken from you, you can find a way to sustain.

7. Doesn’t the phrase ‘edible classroom‘ just make you feel like good things are happening in the world?

From a Philly garden. (Picture: http://www.ngalandtrust.org/)

8. If Mrs. Obama thinks organic gardening is a good thing, I do too.

9. Urban community gardens can be a great way to feed–and empower–the homeless. Check out this program in Missouri; or this one in Chicago, where they “employ 30 part-time workers, including ex-offenders, and provide job training while helping to alleviate the food desert problem in the area. They estimated they’d grow about 10,000 lbs of produce this year on just 2/3 of an acre”; or this other gemstone in Chicago.

10. Because, according to Norfolk OffBase’s Tom Palumbo, “with the industrial revolution we lost contact with our fathers (literally and figuratively). In an agrarian economy, it was expected that all family members would pull together to keep the family fed and the farm going. My aunt hails from a old farming family of 12 people. She shared with me this past summer ‘40 acres’–she explained 40 acres of good land could sustain a family and more. By not only the harvesting of the gardens and fields, but by maintaining a couple of milking cows, chickens, what have you, a large family could sustain themselves.

“I hold on to that vision and look forward to returning to the farm. Community gardens are a microcosm to the family farm. We reconnect with the earth and our (community) family.”

11. We live in a world where our minds are trained more to analyze the solvency of business plans than to appreciate the natural world around us. Within this brittle ecosystem of our planet, I’m not sure that if the dominant species has this attitude we have a chance of sustaining.

From a Portland garden.

12. Community gardens benefit the economy.

13. In a society where the primary arbitrators of values are television executives, webmasters, and glossy magazine editors; the soul, by some heretical twist, has become gauche. If you’re the average citizen from my generation, to speak of one’s soul is to be laughed out of the party…and to be a part of a community garden is to have an open conversation about the soul.

14. If they can do it successfully in DC, we can do it here too, damn it! And in Roanoke… and in Richmond… (This is already a huge national trend, y’all.)

I could write a book about this. (I kind of did, actually. I wrote a little book about my time working on farms in Ireland that literally not one other human being has read. So, if you’re interested, email me: jesse@altdaily.com.)

But all of that is beside the point! Come to the meeting! Let’s get our hands dirty, make friends, make love, make dirty love with our friends. It’s alllll happening.