Meg Perry Garden Blooming with Vegetables and Flowers!

Common Ground’s community gardens are starting to bloom with fresh and nutritious fruits and vegetables!! Food security and access to healthy, fresh produce is a right of all New Orleans residents and returning evacuees. Common Ground Relief is working to uphold this right. Through the Meg Perry Garden, we hope to increase access to wholesome, nourishing produce while also increasing the area’s biodiversity and land quality.

Located by the London Street Canal off of St. Denis and Paris, Common Ground has been busy planting at the Meg Perry Garden.

We are currently growing:

squash

cucumbers

tomatoes

basil

dill

chard

kale

radishes

mullberries

peppers

lots of herbs

corn

Grown organically our plants are wholesome and healthy, producing enough to provide greens and radishes for the residents at the Common Ground Women's Shelter, Family Shelter, and the surrounding communities. Come by on a Saturday and visit the Sprouts club; a children’s program working in the garden. From stenciling flowers to watering plants to weeding the garden, the community is welcome to contribute towards this positive environment.

Common Ground and neighborhood resident Kelly Williams also began planting the new Sandy and Esther Memorial Community Garden in Gentilly, starting with a lemon tree and an orange tree. We plan to make this garden completely organic, using compost gathered from St. Mary's volunteer home. The community will also be brought in to help develop this garden and to raise a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. This is an exciting way to create a positive community place, to build collaboration between residents of the neighborhood, and bring some life back to a community that has been largely abandoned since the storm. This garden lot is also the site of a bioremediation project using sunflowers and mycelium.

Perhaps one of the most exciting new projects we are working on is a sunflower lead bioremediation study in cooperation Tulane University. This study will include soil testing at ten different sites in the lower ninth ward before, during, and after the planting of sunflowers which are lead hyperaccumulators (they draw large amounts of lead from the soil into their plant tissue). We hope to observe a reduction in lead contamination in the soil planted with sunflowers, and to legitimize bioremediation tactics for this crucially affected area of New Orleans. So, look out for rows of sunflowers blooming in the next several months restoring our soil and our smiles!

We look forward to developing these beautiful spaces in the city with the assistance of our residents and hard-working volunteers! Any help is appreciated, both with work in the garden and in contributions. At this time, we are still growing, and volunteers and community members are our best resources! If you would like to become involved or make a donation, please get in contact with us at Common Ground.

Take a look at the work we’re doing here!

Want to donate?
The Garden needs topsoil & truck parts- email healthysoilproject@gmail.com for more info
Click here to support the garden financially.