A partnership between a local church, restaurants and the rest of the Pacific Beach community, in conjunction with a San Diego composting collective, is bearing fruit in the form of usable, sustainable public gardens.
Cass Street Community Garden on the campus of Christ Lutheran Church in Pacific Beach is an organic garden with 12 raised beds collectively gardened by local people on a first-come, first-served contract basis. There is a small waiting list for a plot. “This vegetable garden is intended to be an oasis … a place to satisfy your green thumb as well as nurture your senses, and raise healthy fresh food,” said Taflin Fisher, associate in ministry at Christ Lutheran Church. “We have just partnered with Food2Soil, a social enterprise that connects gardens to restaurants.”
Food2Soil is a San Diego composting collective working cooperatively with restaurants, hotels and individuals to help them divert their food waste.
“We’re a community organization under the umbrella of nonprofit Inika,” said Susan Chambers of Food2Soil. “We manage collaborative efforts with community gardens, urban farms, etc. to help them manage food waste responsibly and resourcefully.”
Chambers said Food2Soil acts as a broker forging a relationship between local restaurants and local gardeners. The objective is to use local food waste to improve local soil fertility.
“We have a team of soil growers or technicians we call players,” Chambers said. “In this relationship, we let the soil growers take food scraps from their restaurant partners, and use the food waste to make nutrient-rich compost diverting waste from landfills.”
Chambers added this composting relationship “benefits the community in a lot of ways, such as providing entrepreneurial opportunities for composting technicians creating value in recycling food waste. The restaurant chefs benefit because their customers know they are resourcing all of their food by putting it back into the soil.”
Fisher said participating high-end restaurants, like Wheat & Water in Bird Rock, that are interested in sustainability, “pay to participate, and donate their uncooked vegetable and fruit scraps to be composted.” She pointed out food from the church’s community garden is served to low-income seniors weekly at Christ Lutheran.
Fisher added the community garden’s growers have supplied materials and built five new wooden bins for composting.
“Technicians from Food2Soil pick up the veggie matter from restaurants, take it to the garden compost bins, manage the bins, and then give the finished compost to the gardeners for use,” Fisher said, noting small bags of fresh compost are then taken back to the restaurants for promotional use as well.
One person utilizing Cass Street Community Garden is Jeffrey Brian Fisch. He coordinates the garden noting, “I pretty much make sure everything’s running smoothly, making decisions on doing the composting. We now have 14 people growing food in 14 plots. People grow their own food using the compost, which makes the plants healthier.”
Fisch, who used to be involved with the now-defunct Pacific Beach Community garden in Crown Point, said public garden space in the beach community is at a premium, which makes gardening spaces like the one on Cass Street that much more important. He added this process of growing food, eating it and then turning the scraps into compost and reintroducing it back into the soil “allows the earth to be replenished, and you have food grown from scraps that can be consumed, with the leftovers then put right back into the soil. It’s a little bit of a circle.”
“There is a great need for community gardens in the PB area,” said longtime community activist Paula Gandolfo, adding, “I began an online petition a few weeks back, and already have more than 100 signatures.”
Gandolfo invites Beach & Bay readers to go to Change.org and look up beautifulPB to sign the group’s gardening petition.
Gandolfo’s also working on acquiring a couple of PopUp Gardens in De Anza, which she said need to be big enough to accommodate a large number of urban gardeners.
Gandolfo made a plea to PB residents to “think about sharing their space with community gardeners.” She added people might be surprised at just how well – and easy – it can be for local gardeners to be self-sustaining growing vegetables while working collaboratively to reduce liability, water and development costs by sharing resources. Want to know more? – Visit inikasmallearth.org to learn more about Food2Soil. – Visit change.org and search for “Approve the beautifulPB – De Anza Pop-Up Garden” for more on beautifulPB’s efforts for community gardens. – Visit seedmoney.org for more information on beautifulPB’s efforts to create a community garden at St. Andrew’s by the Sea Church.