Garden for the Environment

& White Crane Springs Community Garden

This past Saturday, on our way to Hawk Hill, Chris and I stopped by the community gardens on 7th street. We discovered them on a previous journey to Golden Gate Heights, but when we found them it was dusk and they had closed for the day.

The entrance to Garden for the Environment.

Garden for the Environment is a half-acre organic garden demonstrating small-scale urban organic food production, organic gardening, low water-use landscaping and urban compost systems. They also offer weekly workshops on organic gardening, sustainable landscaping and urban composting – as well as many other great programs. When we got there they had two classes in session ‘Intro to Urban Gardening’ and ’18 Reasons Urban Farm School’. Although we didn’t attend the classes (perhaps another weekend adventure?), we did spend some time looking around the garden. There were lots of:

Adorable succulents!

Neat flowers!

Fruits & vegetables! I don't know what this one is though...

In order to not interrupt the currently running class, Chris and I exited through the entrance way we came in, went around the outside, and entered through the second entrance to look around some more. Little did I know, the two entrances are actually for two different gardens that happen to be connected at the center! The second garden is the White Crane Springs Community Garden.

The entrance to the White Crane Springs Community Garden.

White Crane Springs Community Garden has been providing beauty and pleasure to the Sunset District since the 1970’s. (GftE was created in 1990.) It is open to the public and provides a peaceful respite from city life. The garden is maintained using the best organic practices and sustainability projects including composting, sheet mulching and a Cob shed complete with a green living roof.

Even though I couldn’t really tell the difference between the two, White Crane Springs Community Garden seemed to have more of your typical regimented fruit/vegetable garden beds, whereas Garden for the Environment seemed more freeform.

WCS's regimented vegetable gardens.

White Crane Springs Community Garden also had a giant version of my brother’s favorite plant from growing up:

Lamb's Ear

Chris and I had fun walking around the garden taking pictures. One of the garden workers in the compost division was extremely annoying and kept heckling Chris and I because we had cameras. The second time we passed him, he offered to pose for a picture and Chris obliged. He then posted it on the internet and I called him a fucking idiot. I want to come back another weekend to take one of the classes and hopefully fucking idiot won’t be there. If you’re into urban gardening, you’d love either garden. To see more pictures of both gardens check out my flickr. If gardens aren’t your thing, check out my collection of San Francisco parks to find one better suited for you.

Linzi