Community Corner
Community garden at Brook Run coming back
Vandalized garden is getting cleaned up and being replanted
It didn’t take long for Dunwoody’s community garden to get things turned around.
, breaking fencing, tearing up signs, destroying trellises and strewing around lettuce that was ready to be harvested for a local food pantry.
On Monday, it was a different story. Volunteers with the garden, about 15 to 20 of them, pitched in over the weekend and Monday and repaired the fencing, threw away ruined vegetables into compost bins, and turned an eye toward the spring and summer crops that will soon be planted there.
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“If you were to go over to the garden now, you wouldn’t be able to tell,” said Don Converse, head of the board of the nonprofit Community Garden. “We’re moving on. We’ve got gardens to rebuild and the needy to take care of.”
One of the focal points of the garden is harvesting vegetables weekly and then handing them over to St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church, right across the street from Brook Run Park on North Peachtree Road.
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Last year, the food bank donated 3,000 pounds of food to the church’s food pantry. This week, due to the vandalism, the community garden wasn’t going to be able to make its weekly donation.
But that’s worked itself out, too.
Local media station 11 Alive News heard about the incident over the weekend and contacted Home Depot and Costco on behalf of the garden. Costco planned to donate Monday 30 to 40 pounds of peppers, tomatoes and lettuce to cover the weekly contribution to the food pantry. Home Depot is donating flats of seedlings to be replanted in the 90-bed garden.
Angela Minyard, a garden board member, saw the silver lining in the mischief that disrupted the garden.
“When something bad happens; something good happens,” she said. “Things like this can help bring the community together.”
The city’s Community Garden has been lucky up to this point. It’s been in existence for about two-and-a-half years. Aside from a random pepper that’s turned up missing or a little graffiti it’s been left alone, say organizers.
Now, $500 is being raised for information that could lead to an arrest. Some donations have already been donated to the nonprofit, Converse said. If more money is raised than the $500 reward, the garden would use the money to buy more vegetables for the food pantry’s garden beds and individual beds, Converse said.
