The Beautiful Shiloh Community Garden

By Pat Hinkley

One steamy August morning I found a beautiful community garden in the Shiloh neighborhood of Asheville. In it bean plants heavy with green bounty and fragrant basil plants waited picking. Healthy looking tomato plants sprawled over new straw mulch laid down to cool their roots, conserve water and block weeds. Red, ripe tomatoes would soon beckon neighbors to taste their summer goodness. Newly planted carrot seeds lay waiting to sprout from the dark, rich soil. Collards would soon be planted for fall picking.

This garden is a peaceful place of fragrant smells and picnic tables to sit at with neighbors, a place to just relax outside with the birds and breeze. You may even eat delicious vegetables ripened perhaps in the soil of your ancestors. Meetings and storytelling held here have been found even more enjoyable by being out in nature. Community is celebrated at the Shiloh Garden during Neighborhood Work Week when the closed off street allows celebration, DJs, games and food. The garden can be peaceful and vibrant!

Shiloh Community
Garden began after a former Little League Team donated the land.
Dedicated neighborhood gardeners joined the Shiloh Community
Association Garden Committee and volunteers from the Bountiful Cities
Project to change a muddy, debris-filled space into a place of beauty.
Many projects have grown from this garden’s possibilities.

Gardens are like that. They inspire creative actions like the Healthy
Buncombe grant for the Garden Committee to create the “Strong Roots
Youth Program” and “Eat Smart, Move More Program” that brought water to
the garden. The ‘Strong Roots,’ after-school program, held every
Wednesday, lets young children know where food comes from and enjoy its
flavors fresh from the earth.

There are plans to work with the city to create a pavilion where
residents can picnic out of the sun or rain and take pleasure in the
garden. The Garden Committee will soon publish a cookbook and looks
forward to a newsletter. So much good has come from the dreams of those
who began this garden.

The Shiloh Community Garden welcomes you. If you’d like to help, learn
to garden or just be there with others, stop by Wednesdays, 10 a.m. – 1
p.m., or the last Sunday of each month, 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. Garden
stories, singing and games often go on beside the helping and watching.
Many rewarding projects await your hands, and the great bounty of
nature will feed you. Perhaps even as this article goes to print you
will still find red juicy ripe tomatoes waiting on their vines for you.
Hope you get there in time!