“If you just sit across a bed and chat with somebody while you’re weeding carrots, our hope is that you find out that what divides you is less important than the things you have in common,” says Anne Harrison, manager of the Simple Gifts Community Garden.
She’s describing the second of a three-pronged goal behind the community garden, which established its original location in Apex in 2009.
The first prong, she says, is growing organic produce for people in need. “But equally important, I think, is building community, to give people a chance from different walks of life, different faiths, different backgrounds to get to know each other in a non-threatening environment.”
The garden is sponsored by Apex United Methodist Church, but “anyone from anywhere in the community” is welcome to join.
It all started when the church’s social justice ministry discussed different issues in the community and decided to address hunger.
Anne thought back to a lesson from her father. “They never had a lot of money,” she says of his upbringing. “They ate meat as a special occasion on Sundays, but they never worried about being truly hungry because they grew their own food.”
In today’s world, she says, “That’s something that people don’t have the space for, or the know-how, or the sunlight.”
The group set out “to teach people how to grow food, and also that they can grow more food than they imagine in a small space, even in container gardens.”
The garden operates on a membership model. For a yearly fee of $20 per family, members can stop by any time during daylight hours to sit at the onsite picnic tables and enjoy the view of the pond, and cut fresh flowers and herbs to take home. (Scholarships are available for those who cannot afford the membership fee.)
All produce is harvested only on group workdays — currently Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings. But “when tomatoes and squash and cucumbers start coming in, you just can’t go five days between harvesting,” Anne says, so a Thursday morning session will join the lineup in mid-June.
Members are invited to take home a modest portion of the harvests, but the bulk of the produce is donated to local food pantries.
“The longer something sits on a shelf, the more nutritional value it loses, so we try to get it to food banks in as fresh a state as possible,” Anne says.
Produce harvested on Saturday workdays goes to the Care Pantry at Point Church in Cary. Tuesday’s bounty goes to the Holly Springs Food Cupboard for Thursday distribution. And Thursday’s crops will head to the White Oak Foundation’s Friday-morning food pantry, a new partnership for this growing season.
“Processed and packaged foods is the majority of what (food banks) get because of shelf life,” Anne says, so the fresh organic produce is a welcome — and wholesome — addition to their supply.
Crops include “almost all of the vegetables that we grow in this area,” except sweet potatoes. “We are the sweet potato capital of the United States,” Anne says. Thus, “so many people grow them around here that the food banks are inundated.”
In keeping with the goal to teach people how to grow their own food, no gardening experience is necessary. “We have people who come and say they have a black thumb, and we generally prove them wrong,” Anne says.
Participants run the gamut. “We have introverts, extroverts, all types,” Anne says — including kids. “If they can walk, we can include them in gardening.”
“We get a lot of kids who need service hours. Personally, that’s one of my favorite parts because almost inevitably we get kids who either love it and want to do it in some form, whether it’s a hobby or a vocation for the rest of their lives, or they want to work really hard in school so they never have to work outside again.”
Workdays are flexible, and Anne says they follow a “no-guilt gardening” model because they don’t want anyone to think, “Oh, gosh, I haven’t been in so long I’d be embarrassed to show up again.” Some members show up every workday, and others may pop in once a month. Families with young children will often visit for part of a workday and leave early.
“If they want to throw rocks in the pond, that’s okay too,” Anne says of the children who frequent the garden. “It’s just about getting kids familiar, getting them out in nature, helping them understand where their food comes from.”
When doing garden tours with kids, Anne says she always asks kids about their favorite vegetable. “Somebody always says potatoes. I say, well, where are the potatoes? Do you see them? And most of them don’t know that potatoes grow underground. They’ve (only) seen them in the grocery store.”
New for this year, the garden plans to add handicap-accessible table garden beds. An Eagle Scout will build some beds with V-shaped bases that are accessible to wheelchair users.
The third prong of the garden’s goal, after donating food and fostering community, is educating people about sustainability options. In addition to growing many pollinator-friendly plants like milkweed — which helps foster lessons about the circle of life, teaching children the importance of leaving caterpillars to mature outdoors for the future — the garden follows organic practices, and encourages composting to turn food scraps into usable garden amendments.
“Even if they don’t want to join, they’re always welcome to bring us their food scraps,” Anne says.
This season continues a rebuilding phase for the garden. When the owner of the original plot’s land passed away in 2020, organizers found themselves looking for a new site. After a year and a half of searching, they found some land owned by the YMCA off Tingen Road in Apex. This will be the third season in the new space.
“Overall, I don’t know that I would have ever said, oh, it would be great to start over, but we did learn a lot of things that we did differently the second time,” Anne says, “so that’s been a big help.”
Membership currently sits at around 80 families. For new prospective members and others in the community interested in the garden’s mission, an open house and native plant sale this weekend — from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday, May 31 — invites everyone to come out and see what the garden’s all about. The day will also include a kids’ planting activity, games, refreshments, and garden tours.
