Urban Farming and Community Gardens
Urban farming and community gardening offer a multitude of cultural benefits, including increased access to fresh food, improved mental and physical health and stronger social cohesion and diversity acceptance. They also enhance the environment through stormwater management, increased biodiversity and reduced heat island effect.
Expert Gardening Support and Education
Integrity regularly partners with firms like Columbus Foodscapes to ensure that our urban farming and community garden clients have beautiful, productive spaces. Classes and one-on-one garden coaching help even beginner gardeners to have fantastic harvest!
Designing for the Seasons
Our community garden spaces are always designed for 4-season production, useability and aesthetics. Seasonal celebrations are a fun way to come together and enjoy the harvest!
Pollinator Plants
Urban farms and community gardens often suffer from poor pollination rates due to the lack of diversity in the surrounding landscape. We always include a wide variety of native perennial plants and non-invasive annuals in our spaces to ensure that the gardeners will have lush, rich harvests!
Community Engagement
Garden spaces always offer wonderful opportunities for relationship-building! This large community garden located in a new development has helped homeowners to not only meet each other, but to share growing tips and crops that are unique to their culture.
Farmers Markets
Farmers markets are such a fun way to share the harvest! This community garden features a large 'you-pick' area; flowers, herbs and vegetables are harvested from this area and offered at no charge to all of the residents at seasonal farmers markets.
Raised Beds
Raised beds often give a clean, aesthetically-pleasing appearance to garden spaces. In urban farms and community gardens, they also help to keep bed assignments organized and clear. This large community garden is located on degraded farm land; the raised beds offered a good solution to quickly provide a rich, productive growing environment to the residents.
Flowers in the Garden
We always include flowers in urban farms and community gardens! The background planting of sunflowers at this garden helped to enrich and loosen compacted degraded soil. Bouquets of zinnias, cosmos and grasses provide bright spots of color in the landscape and are used as bouquets inside the gardener's homes.
Sunflowers!
Sunflowers are a given in our urban farm and community garden projects! In low budget projects, inexpensive sunflower birdseed can be used as an initial in-ground bed planting to loosen soil and bring dramatic color and scale to the space.
Art in the Garden
This wonderful old manure spreader brings not only visual interest but historic context to this large community garden located in a newly-developed urban area in an agricultural community.
Events in the Garden
Seasonal events in the garden create wonderful opportunities for community-building. This fall harvest festival event featured local cider and doughnuts, a fire pit, a farmers market and a free pumpkin and mum giveaway!
Office Gardens
Offices can be wonderful sites for urban farming. We created a design for this central Ohio cooking school that carved out a long strip of the parking lot to create beautiful raised growing beds. A deck and bluestone patio areas in the front and on the side of the building create fun spaces for dining enjoyment, and also offer pockets of additional growing space for vegetables, fruits and herbs.
Sustainable Gardening Practices
Densely planted raised beds can produce huge harvest of flowers, fruits and vegetables in limited spaces. This pretty edible garden in a central Ohio residential back yard allows the owners to avoid using chemicals by practicing a multitude of sustainable gardening practices, including companion planting, square foot gardening, stormwater collection and intense soil development.