Salt Lake City— Wasatch Community Gardens (WCG) is thrilled to announce that it is officially breaking ground on its new WCG Campus project in Central City. This project is the culmination of eight years of extensive planning with community members, organizational partners, Salt Lake City, and supporters for the local nonprofit, which has more than 30 years of experience in starting and maintaining garden-based programs throughout Salt Lake County with the mission of empowering people to grow local, healthy, organic food. The ground-breaking brings bold new life to Salt Lake City’s urban gardening scene, which has received heightened engagement in response to the pandemic at a time when the disconnect between people and their food has never been wider.
“Local food is one of those high impact ideas that invites everyone to the table,” says WCG’s Executive Director Ashley Patterson. “While not everyone has the resources to grow their own garden, everyone eats and everyone should have access to fresh and healthy food at an affordable price. This Campus is our next step in bringing out that vision for our community.”
The 1.2-acre Campus, located at 800 S 600 E, will be constructed at the site of WCG’s flagship Grateful Tomato Garden. The project will transform WCG’s ability to serve more community members through enhanced class offerings and event space. It will complement the site’s existing greenhouse and outdoor kitchen to include a garden education cottage with a teaching kitchen and indoor learning space, and enhanced teaching and demonstration gardens. The variety and scale of the new Campus will allow WCG to demonstrate many different food growing techniques, including vertical gardening, square foot gardening, maximizing small urban spaces such as balconies and window boxes for growing food, and using a greenhouse and hoop house to extend the growing season.
“WCG continues to bump up against limitations in our ability to serve all in our community,” notes Patterson. “This Campus is intended to invite more people to the table and the garden through its welcoming design and our expanded program offerings.”
The Campus will also be a transformational example of how Salt Lake City and other urban centers might work to solve multiple social issues simultaneously. To expand, WCG has purchased the three single-family residential buildings to the east of the Campus. As a condition to WCG’s request to rezone these properties, Salt Lake City required WCG to replace the housing units. WCG rose to the challenge, insisting that any on-campus residential units be innovative, green and affordable. The non-profit engaged Giv Development to design an eight-unit, affordable (units will be priced to serve those at 70% area median income), net zero energy building.
“We want to demonstrate that adding density around a garden is not only viable, but appealing to the community,” Patterson said. “We believe this can be a model for developers or non-profit organizations who want to maintain farmland or garden space in a development, a tactic which is not being done in our area where farms and gardens are rapidly disappearing under buildings and parking lots.”
WCG’s primary aim for the Campus is to create more healthy, local, organic food with more people involved in the local sustainable food movement. The non-profit ultimately hopes to increase the number of gardening projects (both started by WCG and started by other groups and organizations) throughout Salt Lake County.
“We believe the Campus project will inspire others in the community to start their own urban agriculture projects,” said Patterson. “We look forward to working with the community and with elected leaders to allocate the resources to make that happen.”
Construction for the Campus is expected to complete in Summer 2021. For more information, visit www.wasatchgardens.org/dig.