Defining Community Gardening: Why People Garden and How to get More Involved

Abstract

1. Introduction: explanation of how gardening and food production related to agriculture has affected me personally and how that motivated me to choose this topic. 2. Literary review: gardening as we know it – This section will cover what we know about gardening and urban agriculture and how it can benefit the health of people and communities. 3. Literary review: Limits to gardening – This section will begin to discuss the limits and questions the capstone discusses about gardening that has been addressed in literature. What types of people participate in gardening? Why do those people garden? What does it require to garden? 4. Data collection & Results: This section will discuss in principle the collection of data to make a conclusion about gardening and how it affects the population that participate in it and how those can help define how to provide its benefits to more people. This will be structured in three ways, a firsthand analysis of the Community Gardens of Tucson as an intern, an interview with a garden manager with the community gardens, and a case study of a garden there. The interview will focus on what can be done about the population of people that use the gardens and how to recruit would-be gardeners as well as other barriers and challenges to community gardening. The case study will focus on the specific situation that an individual garden may go through. 5. Proposal: This section will discuss a possible way of recruiting more people into the realm of gardening, using the context from data collection and the current literature about the topic. 6. Limitations & Conclusion: This section analyses how the data collected can be used in a practical manner to better the practice of community gardening.