It seems that more and more I hear about various communities creating community gardens.  We now have 3 community gardens in Temple Terrace where Jim and I garden at the Riverhills location.  The other gardens are Greco Middle School and Linwood, with Linwood being the newest garden.  We also have a garden at Riverhills Elementary where the children have an opportunity to join the garden club on Friday mornings and grow vegetables.

With our growing community of gardens here in Temple Terrace - we visited with some fellow garden members to another community garden located in the Carrollwood area.  This community garden started approximately three years ago and is very popular!  They have a waiting list of people waiting to join - so all gardeners are active in the garden.  The Vista Gardens is located in Carrollwood Village at 13572 S Village Dr, Tampa, FL 33618. Vista stands for "Village Institute for Sustainable Technologies & Agriculture".  Here's some photographs of this wonderful garden!

A few gardeners were there when we visited and one gentleman was nice enough to take a few minutes from his compost duties to provide us a tour. (Thank you!).  They have several compost bins that are turned every week - a few of the gardeners do this every Thursday.  After about four weeks, they have compost ready to be used in the garden.

The garden has a well and solar panels to run the necessary parts as there is no electricity on site.

The garden pathways are all done in mulch and gardeners weed the various areas regularly to keep weeds from coming up and taking over the mulch.

A bee keeper asked if they could put together a few homes for the bees.  This helps the garden by providing the pollinators that are needed for the vegetables and also helps the bee keeper by providing a location as well as honey.

The various gardens are each growing different vegetables but also have unique artwork in many giving a wonderful variety as well as individuality to the garden plots.

A special area is set aside for the butterflies and it is a wonderful area with lots of flowers.  A gardener recently did major changes to the butterfly garden and it is ablaze with flowers and butterflies.

I noticed a 'siamese eggplant' growing on one of the garden plants - never seen this before!

They have a nice shed where all the tools are stored as well as a large area for various types of communication among the members.

And a beautiful sunflower growing in our dry season, sometimes it appears to be like the desert here with the lack of rain and Florida being on fire in many different areas.

Join the moment - join a community garden!  Or if one doesn't exist in your area, maybe it's just waiting for the right person or group of people to start a community garden.