Exploring Community Garden Coordinators’ Perceptions of Climate-Smart Adaptations to Support Local Food Systems
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Theoretical Framework
3. Purpose and Research Questions
- What are community garden coordinators’ perceptions of the need for climate change adaptation?
- What are community garden coordinators’ perceptions regarding the five perceived attributes of climate change adaptation?
- Where are community garden coordinators in the innovation–decision process when it comes to climate change adaptation?
4. Materials and Methods
4.1. Participant Selection and Data Collection
4.2. Instrumentation and Data Analysis
4.3. Reflexivity Statement
5. Results
5.1. Relative Advantage
We would not have an advantage to using rain barrels…drip irrigation would take us 71 gallons per minute, roughly, and the well will produce 100 gallons per minute. And so, you could have a lot of rain barrels and just not get any benefit out of that.
We don’t want to put chlorine in, or anything like that, so we don’t try to sterilize the water, or UV is too expensive to try to keep it clean at this point. So that’s something we did try. And there’s just, you know, water lines get clogged…algae kind of tends to grow. So it’s just more of a pain in the butt.
I live 35 min away, so a lot of times when I’m thinking through different products, it’s what’s gonna survive when I go home for a weekend and I’m not in the county watching after it…just the ease of the garden maintaining itself where I’m not having to be out there every single day.
Generally, what I try to select for are disease resistance in plants. Just because in south Georgia, the disease issue is…it’s just so humid, hot here. I mean, every kind of plant disease you can have, we have down here. When you plant a resistant plant, you don’t have to use fungicides and things like that. It’s better for the environment and better for you eating it too…you don’t have all these pesticides on your plants.
I think sometimes more resilient plants are maybe hairier or tougher, and I don’t know if that’s quite as tasty…at least in my experience with more of the resilient plants. They’re usually tougher to harvest, in my opinion. I always get a little bit like a skin rash or you need to space out the plants a little bit more so you’re not, I don’t know, like they have a little bit of a different set of rules that we would need to learn for the community.
5.2. Compatibility
The deer have been our biggest issue because our grant will not provide for fencing…So our grant is a 70/30. So, for every dollar that we spend, the [garden’s organization name] has to come up with 30 cents of that, and the grant pays 70 cents of that. So, we’re still working on donated funds at all times and have to always look at the stewardship of everything we do.
No one wants the purple okra that can handle the heat, and no one wants the basil that smells like licorice. So, I think that’s just not a huge priority of ours for the next couple of years…Our area really prioritizes what they grew up with. That’s always gonna be the first thing that people think about as well. ‘This is what I’ve known for 60 years. Why would I trust this other technique when this has worked for multiple generations?’ So, I think that’s going to be a big part of it.
We then feed our compost to worms, the worms then produce their byproduct, which is worm manure. And then we use that to create sprays for the plants and for fertilizers. Their actual gut biome in a worm is a fascinating thing. When we make it into a spray, it actually helps to fight off a lot of the diseases that are readily available, or in our area.
5.3. Complexity
If we planted something new we would hand water it just for maybe the first two weeks whenever it looked like it needed it. But I was kind of on the like, if it wants to survive, let it survive, and if it wants to die, let it die… Because that’s a lot more realistic for people in the [name of area] community. They’re not going to be out there every day watering their garden. They want something that can kind of be like set it, forget it, and harvest when it’s ready.
5.4. Trialability
Our extension has a demonstration garden, and so they are constantly doing little research projects there. Like they did the downy mildew study for the basil, and I think they’re going to start looking at different hybrids of tomatoes. So, we go to the extension once a month for our meetings, and we get up to date on that.
That would have the biggest impact on me and probably many of the other gardeners… would be if somebody had like a reason for doing it this way and they tried it, and it was successful. I mean, I think most of us would say, ‘Okay, if I’m growing Cherokee purple tomatoes, and they did a whole lot better than these celebrities that they grew in the garden next to me, then yeah, I’m probably gonna grow whatever grows the best.’
5.5. Observability
6. Discussion
7. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Theme | Description | Representative Quotation |
---|---|---|
Relative Advantage | Advantage to climate-smart irrigation | “We have finite resources. And because of that, we have to implement strategies that can help us combat that. We use drip irrigation. We go low and slow”. (Michael, SC) |
Advantage to using compost | “It’s what makes our veggies grow…Our beds [pH] are like eight, and you need like 6.5 to grow vegetables, so if we didn’t have the compost we would not be growing vegetables in those beds”. (Mary, NC) | |
Compatibility | Incompatible with cultural food preferences | “No one wants the purple okra that can handle the heat, and no one wants the basil that smells like licorice. So, I think that’s just not a huge priority of ours for the next couple of years…Our area really prioritizes what they grew up with. That’s always gonna be the first thing that people think about as well”. (Katie, SC) |
Incompatible with garden location | “We have an irrigation system that’s hooked up to the town water system. It runs six months out of the year and then it’s shut off…it’s not a system that was set up for freezing…it’s just not an option”. (Maggie, NC) | |
Complexity | Preference for low levels of complexity | “If we planted something new we would hand water it just for maybe the first two weeks whenever it looked like it needed it. But I was kind of on the like, if it wants to survive, let it survive, and if it wants to die, let it die… Because that’s a lot more realistic for people in the [name of area] community. They’re not going to be out there every day watering their garden. They want something that can kind of be like set it, forget it, and harvest when it’s ready”. (Katie, SC) |
Trialability | Necessary to trial in their own garden | “I think trying it in our own garden is gonna be the most helpful in our scenario because we do kind of face some specific restrictions”. (Lily, SC) |
Influence from other gardeners | “That would have the biggest impact on me and probably many of the other gardeners… would be if somebody had like a reason for doing it this way and they tried it, and it was successful”. (Clarke, NC) | |
Observability | Observing another farmer/gardener | “I would say hearing and seeing success from another farmer…if I see it in practice working, I’m much more likely to take the jump and try and invest in it, than having read in just a scientific publication”. (Jackson, GA) |
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Erskine, O.M.; Lamm, A.J.; Sanders, C.E.; Lamm, K.W. Exploring Community Garden Coordinators’ Perceptions of Climate-Smart Adaptations to Support Local Food Systems. Horticulturae 2024, 10, 601. https://doi.org/10.3390/horticulturae10060601
Erskine OM, Lamm AJ, Sanders CE, Lamm KW. Exploring Community Garden Coordinators’ Perceptions of Climate-Smart Adaptations to Support Local Food Systems. Horticulturae. 2024; 10(6):601. https://doi.org/10.3390/horticulturae10060601
Chicago/Turabian StyleErskine, Olivia M., Alexa J. Lamm, Catherine E. Sanders, and Kevan W. Lamm. 2024. "Exploring Community Garden Coordinators’ Perceptions of Climate-Smart Adaptations to Support Local Food Systems" Horticulturae 10, no. 6: 601. https://doi.org/10.3390/horticulturae10060601
APA StyleErskine, O. M., Lamm, A. J., Sanders, C. E., & Lamm, K. W. (2024). Exploring Community Garden Coordinators’ Perceptions of Climate-Smart Adaptations to Support Local Food Systems. Horticulturae, 10(6), 601. https://doi.org/10.3390/horticulturae10060601