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Area community gardens featured in statewide multimedia project

JANESVILLE — With the popularity of community gardens on the rise, the University of Wisconsin-Extension has started a multimedia project, People + Plants, to help spread the word about how to properly start and maintain a community garden.

Mike Maddox, UW-Extension horticulture educator and one of the project leaders, recently filmed footage at community gardens in Janesville, Milton and Beloit to be used in the project. All told, People + Plants will feature six videos, six podcasts and about a dozen print publications that will be available to the public later this fall.

“The ultimate goal is to get research-based information pertaining to community gardens out there to the public,” Maddox said. “The demand for it is probably the highest it has been in a very long time, due to the economy.”

Unfortunately, he added, many people are confused by the “mixed messages that are out there with these do-it-yourselfers, the home garden channel type things.”

“We know the average homeowner has a lot to weed through to find out what’s actually correct and safe information to use,” Maddox said.

The Rock County Community Garden in Janesville will be featured in a segment about how to properly start such a garden.

Maddox and crew also will address other topics, including the benefits of a community garden, container gardening, harvesting and soil safety.

The project is funded by a $37,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Project leader Kristine Zaballos, said People + Plants will help county residents build gardens from the ground up, while allowing Extension officials to demonstrate things that are difficult to explain in writing.

“From the beginning we talked about ‘What story do we need to tell about community gardening?’” Zaballos said. “What do people struggle with?”

The three Rock County community gardens featured in the project are well-established, and although they can serve as a good model for other projects, each garden develops in a unique way, Maddox said.

“You can do your model only so far, but then you’ve got to realize you have to be your own original garden and embrace that,” he said.

Read more about each of the gardens in the Sept. 15, 2010 e-edition of The Janesville Messenger, HERE.