Who are we?

Soil&Water garden is a group of greater Mountain View residents with a love for the outdoors, getting our hands dirty, and creating DIY projects.  We want to help build a community space where people can come to gather, garden, create, and learn from each other.

Mainly, we think it would be really cool to have a shared garden space that is open to everyone!

We've created this site to keep you, our neighbors and community,  informed of what is happening. 

Why shared garden spaces?

Shared gardens--

  • Create a garden space that is built and maintained by volunteers from the community. The fruits of the garden are shared with the community and amongst the volunteers (and really, how many zucchini can one person eat?).

  • Provide a venue for sharing skills and for families and people of all ages and backgrounds to get involved.

  • Teach kids the process of how food comes to them and the effort behind the final product.

  • Create partnerships with local schools and surrounding organizations and businesses.  

  • From a public health perspective, facilitate teaching opportunities about food and nutrition that keep people active and to lead healthy lives.

In an ideal world, everyone would have a little land to grow a garden. With so many people in the Bay Area, there just isn’t enough land but we want to keep food local and encourage people to grow their own. We also want to create a community space that gives back to the community by connecting people through gardening. One way to address this is a typical community garden giving out individual plots for people to garden. This has been so successful in Mountain View that there is a 5+year waiting list at Willowgate!

Urban shared gardens can be a different way of addressing this: have a single large garden that is a shared space.  Together, we collectively design the garden space, plant it, harvest it, and enjoy it.   All gardening work happens through weekly volunteer work days from designing, to building the beds, amending soil, setting up drip, to the actual planting.  We share the harvests and if we have extra, donate it. We also create a space to have social events and special events like cooking demonstrations......a community garden.

The idea of group gardening is not a new one and there are many wonderful garden organizations in the area that already do this.(Common Ground, Full Circle Farm, Veggielution, Gilroy Demonstration Garden).

What are our goals?

The primary objectives of our project are to:  

  1. Create an environment around food production and preparation to build community and develop a sense of belonging for residents.

  2. Demonstrate sustainable farming techniques to grow fresh and healthy foods.

  3. Provide opportunities for recreation, exercise, and education through volunteer participation and cooking/nutrition demonstrations.

  4. Demonstrate that gardens can happen in however small scale and be aesthetically pleasing year round.  

  5. Leverage social media to demonstrate food systems to engage the larger community.   

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