Community garden: Green thumbs at work

For $25 and a little elbow grease, Janie Murray got what she'd always wanted: a vegetable garden.

Murray is one of at least 50 gardeners who have begun toiling happily in the recently opened community garden at the corner of Van Story and Mann Streets, off Old Wilmington Road.

The Fayetteville Community Garden is made up of about 70 20-foot-by-20-foot plots that can be farmed by individuals or organizations for $25 a year plus water costs, said Bemnet Fantu-Downes, with the Sandhills Area Land Trust.

Fantu-Downes said Candace Williams, associate director of Sandhills Area Land Trust, came up with the idea after reading a series about poverty in the Old Wilmington Road area in The Fayetteville Observer.

Williams had participated in a similar community garden project in Boston 20 years ago and wanted to give it a go here, too.

"This is her passion and calling," Fantu-Downes said.

Williams was on vacation this week and unavailable for comment.

The community garden project allows gardeners of all abilities and skills and from all over the city to try their hand at gardening organically, Fantu-Downes said.

Right now, there's a waiting list for the plots, but some could open up soon, she said.

As soon as Murray heard about the project, she called for a plot.

Murray, who splits the cost and the workload with her sister, Annie Haynes, and Haynes' daughter, Tonia Cordoza, said a vegetable garden had been on her wish list for a while.

"I'd been wanting to start a garden, but we don't really have the space at home," Murray said. "I'd read about community gardens in other cities."

One of the best things about the project is how the gardeners have come together to help each other out, she said.

"I'm trying to come out at least once a week, but we had a crisis in our family this week," Murray said. "Somebody came and watered our tomatoes. Everybody helps out."

Fantu-Downes said the easy camaraderie developing between the gardeners and members of the community was amazing to see.

"One day, I saw one of the gardeners sitting on the porch of someone's house in the neighborhood, just talking," she said. "That's what we aspired to, but we didn't expect it to happen so fast."

So far, Murray and her family have planted everything from cantaloupe to squash to beans. When the produce is ready, they plan to share the harvest with friends, family and people in need.

"That's the whole point of this - to share your crop with other people," Haynes said.

But it's also been a fun way to exercise and meet other people with similar interests, Cordoza said.

It's even a little addictive, she said.

"I came to check on it twice during my lunch break this week," Cordoza said. "I just wanted to see how it was doing."

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