The Olde Town Community Garden is making its comeback this year after the pandemic kept people away from it.
“We’ve been cleaning and planting,” said Luke Niday, assistant outreach pastor at First Presbyterian Church. The garden was established about five years ago.
Located at Third and Telfair Streets, the garden once had a dilapidated home on it. Niday said they approached the owner, who removed the property and allows them to plant on the site.
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Christina Berkshire is one of a handful of gardeners who have been working on the site with cultivating the garden as their aim.
Berkshire has her own plot downtown, but she intends to plant flowers in the community garden.
“We’re leaving it up to the people who adopted the beds to plant what they want,” she said. “With my beds, I’m planting spring and summer flowers.”
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She plans to come back later in the season and plant sunflowers.
Each gardener seems to have a different focus, according to Berkshire.
One is a science teacher who is interested in some of the science behind growing so she can teach it to her students; another group wants to grow vegetables to give to a homeless outreach center; and another wants to grow food to cut the monthly grocery bill, she said.
There are also plans to cultivate some rose beds in one section of the lot.
“Something ornamental. We do need something to beautify the space,” she said.
Niday said the garden has been an outreach in other ways, providing a place for people who needed community service to get their hours as required by law.
He added that a local daylily group had donated daylilies for the site. He hopes those will reproduce so that they can be transplanted to other places in the community.
Not only are there plants on the site, but Niday said they’ve developed an irrigation system to keep everything green in the heat of the summer.
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“We collect the rainwater from the house next door,” he said. “We have a renewable water source.”
Niday said the garden provides a way for people to come together and work together to build a sense of community.
Charmain Z. Brackett is the Features Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach her at charmain@theaugustapress.com
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