Mecklenburg County Community Gardens – Tim Turton

00:00:01	Introduction
00:00:25	How Tim Turton got into community gardening
00:01:18	How Community Gardens have affected Mr. Turton
00:01:53	The first commuity garden of Mecklenburg County
00:02:31	The rate of growth of Mecklenburg County community gardens
00:03:13	Differentitations of the community gardens
00:04:46	Winterfield Community Garden
00:06:15	Vandalism and theft in the community garden
00:07:26	Garden Captains role
00:11:09	Median age of the Garden Captains
00:11:22	Median age of gardeners within the community garden
00:11:50	Diversity in the community gardens
00:13:00	Limitations on what can be grown in the community gardens
00:14:31	Garden materials
00:16:00	Till or No-till gardening
00:16:43	Organic gardens
00:17:17	Compost
00:18:21	Mulch
00:21:28	Garden materials continued
00:22:27	Regulations on the size of garden beds
00:23:44	Regulations of weeds
00:24:33	Cover Crops
00:25:32	Operation of the community gardens during seasonal change
00:27:34	Residency in the community gardens
00:28:23	Back flow preventer
00:29:13	Animal and pest management
00:31:11	Prevelant cultures within the community garden
00:32:03	Collaboration with Charlotte Green
00:33:57	Other community gardens and community outreach
00:37:11	Community Outreach through Mecklenburg County community gardens
00:37:48	Expansion and funding of the community gardens
00:40:01	Conclusion and reflecting on community gardens

Johnathan Glover 00:00:01
Good morning, my name is Jonathan Glover and I am here with Tim Turton of Mecklenburg County Parks and Recreation. I’d like to thank you for taking the time out for this interview. It is November 12, 2024 and we are at the Winterfield Community Garden. The first question I’d like to ask you is, when did you get into the whole aspect of the community garden?

Tim Turton
Well, back up a little bit, before that I worked full time for Park and Recreation for 23 years, always with the horticulture team. At the last 16 I managed the horticulture team, which was basically the landscaper of the county, plus some other things we did. So we would get assigned to help out in community gardens every so often, but we didn’t really oversee it 100%. But then when I retired at the end of 2017, I lasted about 30 days. So I came back to Park and Recreation part-time to oversee the 20 community gardens that we have. I’ve been doing this, I’m into my 7th year of doing this. And Scott’s been my partner probably for 4 or 5 years.

Johnathan Glover 00:01:14
And how has that affected you?

Tim Turton
Well, a lot of it’s good. To be honest, it keeps you mentally active. It gives you structure and routine. I love working with the gardeners. Especially when you get in the middle of the summer and you go to some of these community gardens and they’re vegetable plants are beautiful. They’re just great. So you still get to work with the public, still get to have some influence on what’s going on here.

Johnathan Glover 00:01:44
Right. So being that this is a big project and a big overall thing for the Mecklenburg County, what was the first community garden?

Tim Turton
The first one was Dunlavin Community Garden, which is in the Charlotte Country Club area. And that was a fellow by the name of Roy Alexander, who’s unfortunately no longer with us. And we got permission from Stormwater to use their land to build a community garden. That was the first one. Then progressed Little Sugar Creek, which was probably the second one. And then it just kept going. And now we have 20 community gardens of various sizes and shapes and I’d say 600 gardeners in the system.

Johnathan Glover 00:02:29
So did it take like a long time to get this like moving or is it just?

Tim Turton
Well, I don’t know exactly the history of it, but I think it didn’t take that long to get it moving. You know, as people found out that we have the possibility of community gardens, we just started building more and more. And so we are committing if the budget and time is there to do one new community garden a year in the food desert areas. Will that happen? I’m not sure. Park and Rec it’s a lot of pressure from a lot of various factions. And so it just depends.

Johnathan Glover 00:03:33
Right. So with that be a said like are there you said there are a lot of them, of course. So are there like different differentiations between all of them or are they just like usually set up like how Winterfield is?

Tim Turton
There’s no standard. There’s standard. It was like the Oklahoma Sooners people just so a lot of them have fences, not all of them have fences. The size of the plots vary. So when I came in, I tried to standardize things and try to maximize the square footage within the garden to get the maximum number of gardeners in there. And so now we go to four by eight boxes or four by eight plots. And so you can get a lot more gardeners in the space that way. And you think of four by eight isn’t that big for, but actually it can feed a family of four.Now it may not be something where they can,but to provide vegetables during the growing season does a pretty good job for sure. So but the other gardens, most of the gardens are not standardized. And so we have plots that are 30 by 20, 10 by 15. And that ends up being a mistake because people get real enthusiastic. You know, they’re going to have this like mini farm and then they find out in the middle of the summer when it’s 95 degrees out, they don’t want to go and take care of it. And so they leave us. And so they leave the mess to us to clean up. So we’re trying to narrow that down. Now in this case here, we’re building new eight by eight boxes. We have the space. I don’t know if you want to hear the story of this.

Johnathan Glover 00:04:42
Of course.

Tim Turton
So Winterfield Garden in many ways was our model garden. Great with three garden captains, great people. This area behind us is the Children’s Education Garden. The boy scouts build the boxes. They still do it. We have a big Latin American population here, which has drawn in a lot of the kids from the school and the neighborhood and they do a lot of the work in here. It’s it’s really, really good. However, this really strange thing happened last winter, which most of the gardeners left us without even telling us, and two of the garden captains retired, which thank you for doing it. They were doing it like at least 10 years. They were garden captains and we’ll tell you about garden being a garden captain a little bit here. But so we’ve had to remodel it. So my our idea of going to four by eight boxes has changed and we’re doing eight by eight boxes here because we want to we want to fill this place up with gardeners.

Johnathan Glover 00:05:40
Right.

Tim Turton
So we’re pretty close now. We have three new gardeners coming on. We only have two or three more spaces left. We have a contractor that mows for us and keeps it clean and it’s working out very well.

Johnathan Glover
That’s good.

Tim Turton
Yeah. So you got to adapt.

Johnathan Glover
Right.

Tim Turton
So the ones that have fences and the ones that don’t have fences, if I can go to some of the problems.

Johnathan Glover 00:06:08
Yeah, I was definitely going to ask you that because I was like, with some of them not having fences, do they ever like deal with animals or rodents and stuff like that or vandalism from other people?

Tim Turton
Our opinion, Scott and my partner Scott, in our opinion is most of the theft is internal. It’s a fellow gardener seeing your beautiful cucumbers, maybe taking a few or taking them all. And so that’s always an issue. I don’t care how much you try to prevent it. It’s always an issue. We have had a fence cut vertically and people come in or somebody leaves the gate unlocked and people come in. But the ones that it just it’s ironic. It just depends. The ones without a fence, sometimes they have very little vandalism or theft. The ones with the fence, sometimes they have a lot. So it just depends. It’s not any clear answer to how to prevent that. So cameras wouldn’t work. Plus that’s an expense. That is expensive.

Johnathan Glover
Yeah, it’s expensive.

Tim Turton
So we just have to sort of grin and bear it and hope that it doesn’t get so bad. So that’s that part of it. Okay.

Johnathan Glover 00:07:21
So how do the garden captains, how do they operate in these spaces?

Tim Turton
Okay, so garden captains are volunteers.

Johnathan Glover
Okay.

Tim Turton
And that’s great. And recently last year, so they do get a background check. This is a public entity, a public space. And what they do is they help, they’re my liaison, they’re my eyes and ears out here. And so we have a link on the park and recreation website, www.parkandrec.com. You go click on parks and you click on community gardens. And there’s a way to, there’s a formal application, which is a real simple application and rules. You have to read all the rules, which are at least two pages long. And so they fill out the application, they send it to me and then I send it to the garden captain who assists. And they will contact the person and tell them, we’re full, we have a waiting list of such and such, we have a number. Or they’ll say, yeah, we have an opening. When would you like to meet? And the garden captain does the orientation or if they can’t, I will come out. But they have 99% of the time they’ll do it. They’ll meet the person and go from there, reiterate the rules to them. The garden captain is the eyes and ears. If there’s somebody by policy in the rules, if your plot is not being kept up and they send me an email saying, hey, look at the picture of this plot. I want to give them the two week rule, which is if you don’t clean up your plot within two weeks, you might get evicted. We always say might because there might be a death in the family or some crisis that they haven’t been able to get there. But we have evicted people and probably 10 in the last year or so, which I don’t think is a real high number. So then if the people have been in their plot, we’ve gotten out and cleaned them up. So the garden captain also is asked, this is all voluntary, asked if they could organize a spring cleanup and a fall cleanup in the garden. And for the garden captains that are able to do that, it really helps. It brings the community back together. Like they just last Saturday had a big cleanup day here. They did a potluck lunch. All these people showed up. It was a great thing. Lincoln Heights Community Garden, which is in the inner city, they did a cleanup the other day. It’s immaculate. It looks so great. So the garden captains and I communicate, some garden captains and I communicate every week. There are, you know, garden captains quit. They resign, they retire, whatever, for 99% of the time, good reasons. And then we have a challenge of finding a new garden captain. And so we’ll put it on our web link. We’re looking for a garden captain. And like right now, we were looking at Eva Barber, here, and one other place, but people have stepped up. Sometimes it takes a long time for somebody. It’s like any meeting you’re at and they ask for volunteers, who raises their hand? Probably nobody. And then I give orientation with the new garden captain. We meet out at the site. We talk things over. Try to encourage them and all that good stuff. So that’s it. The garden captain concept works really well. I’m part-time, Scott’s part-time. There’s no way that we can see everything. We can monitor and manage everything. So we really depend on them.

Johnathan Glover 00:11:02
Right. So what would be the median age of these garden captains? Are they like on the older side or are they on the younger side?

Tim Turton
Older side.

Johnathan Glover
Older side.

Tim Turton
Some are retired. Not a lot of them, but some are. But older side, I’d say middle age to senior.

Johnathan Glover
And would that be the same with the people that are actually participating in the garden?

Tim Turton
Very mixed. But I would say the vast majority are over 35 years old.

Johnathan Glover
Okay.

Tim Turton
And why is that? I’m really not sure. And we get a number of families who want to participate. And we get a diverse population. Can I address that?

Johnathan Glover
Yeah, of course.

Tim Turton 00:11:47
Okay, good. Which I love part of that. It’s great. Like there’s a family and a couple of our gardens that grows in a particular kind of corn I’ve never seen before. And I think it’s out of Africa and it’s like 12 feet tall, none of the corn stops are. We have families from Cameroon and they have a very different way of gardening. They garden these mounds and then trenches and mounds and trenches. And they eat plants that are regardless ornamentals. Johnathan: And what is that?

Tim Turton
Like in ornamentals, like something you might grow as a permanent shrub in your yard or permanent perennial in your yard. They’ll eat the roots of it, they’ll take the leaves. One’s called Cantalului. It’s very famous around. And grows about 8 foot tall. And then of course bananas, plants, they grow. And it’s just, and they grow a different kind of spinach I’ve never seen before, which is very tasty. We don’t steal any plants. No, we look at something and we go, “Oh man, I can do it!” So that part’s really fun.

Johnathan Glover 00:12:58
So are there like any limitations on what can be grown in here?

Tim Turton
Yes, that’s a great question. You can’t grow any trees. I can’t grow fig tree. You can grow rose bushes if you want. Nothing can encroach the paths. Nothing can get tall enough to shade out your neighbor. But beyond that, if you wanted to grow a dwarf rose bush or a gardenia or something, you’re allowed to. Some people grow a lot of summer color in their garden, so that’s fine.

Johnathan Glover 00:13:28
So is that like a, right here, is that, would you say that’s like a bush or like a vine right here? The second one down a little bit further down.

Tim Turton
That’s growing on that frame.

Johnathan Glover
Yeah.

Tim Turton
That is an ornamental, that is called honeysuckle and it attracts hummingbirds. It’s a really good pollinator plant. And so they’ve just decided to grow it there. And that’s not in anybody’s way. And that’s what is magical about Winterfield. They just do a lot of different things. They just keep going and going. Like we worked with them across here and put down all this ground cloth and they built these boxes and they have blackberries and blueberries growing in there. They’re open to the public, the public come and gather whatever they want. And it takes effort and will and wanting to do it. And so we have some gardens that are just pretty basic. We’ve got gardeners inside and then we have gardens like this that they just keep pushing the envelope.They do more and more. They just keep wanting to do more and more, which is pretty inspiring.

Johnathan Glover 00:14:29
That’s good. So are you guys providing like materials for these gardeners?

Tim Turton
Yeah, that’s a good question. We do not provide any vegetables, seeds, any kind of plants, but we provide compost. We provide mulch. We don’t always build these boxes. This is a special circumstance. It’s a case by case basis. If we start repairing and replacing people’s boxes, we would never get done.

Johnathan Glover
Right.

Tim Turton
And it would cost a fortune. So people really are on their own to do that. If somebody’s disabled or has some special circumstance, we’ll go in there. We’re building them here because we’re trying to recover the garden and it’s working.

Johnathan Glover
Right. I mean, it looks really good.

Tim Turton
Well, thank you. So we provide tools, we provide rakes and shovels and plant and trowels.

Johnathan Glover
What about electrical?

Tim Turton
Nothing electrical. Nothing gas powered. No battery powered drills. In fact, by county policy, I think that these would all be regarded as volunteers. They can only run a power drill and a blower and a weed eater.

Johnathan Glover
Okay.

Tim Turton 00:15:35
Don’t ask me the logic of that. I’m not sure. That’s was, what my next question was going to be. I was going to be like, exactly how are they like managing? Like how do you, how do you know when something is like, it needs to be tilled if there is even tilling?

Tim Turton
We don’t do any tilling.

Johnathan Glover
No till soil?

Tim Turton
We got rid of that, when I came on, we got rid of that because we don’t, we can’t till all these, but people do.

Johnathan Glover
Right.

Tim Turton
There’ll be a gardener that has his own, her own personal tiller and they’ll get together and they’ll till up. And there is a concept that’s come out and farming in agriculture the last 15, 20 years called no-till gardening. Because the theory is you’re going to mess with the microbial activity in the plot if you till it.

Johnathan Glover
Right.

Tim Turton
And so, you know, a lot of farmers today use no-tilling. So it just depends on the person, but we won’t, we won’t do anything. In a small four by a plot, you could turn it over by hand if you wanted to.

Johnathan Glover 00:16:35
So I’m assuming that you guys really emphasize like organic type growth?

Tim Turton
Yes. By policy, and you can’t monitor this, by policy, no pesticides can be used without my approval.

Johnathan Glover
Right.

Tim Turton
I can’t watch that, I can’t monitor it. But I think even putting that in the rules puts it in people’s mind and I think generally speaking people are very good about that.

Johnathan Glover
Okay. And with the soil and well, the fertilizer, the fertilizer, what else? Mulch and compost.

Tim Turton
Compost

Johnathan Glover
yes. So with the compost, is it compost like, is it a homemade or is it you get it from somebody?

Tim Turton
Mecklenburg County recycling facilities, the main one, central compost. It has windrows, rows and rows of compost at various degrees of readiness. They check the temperature, they have irrigation on it when it needs it, they turn it. So we like their compost. Now it’s not vegetable compost that if you had your own compost bin, this is all the raw material they get from prunings, leaf removal, Christmas trees, all that sort of thing. So every once in a while, it’s very rare, we have people say, you know, can’t you provide the other and we can’t, it’s too expensive. And that’s very rare, people like the compost, they use it. It mixes well, it helps break up the clay.

Johnathan Glover 00:18:50
So can the participants also use their own compost?

Tim Turton
Yeah, they can use their own.

Johnathan Glover
They can?

Tim Turton
Yeah, they can use their own.

Johnathan Glover
And with the mulch, is it a certain type of mulch or is it like wood mulch? I

Tim Turton
It’s a wood mulch, it’s double hammered mulch, which means that they take the wood products at central compost and they have this big bin that they churn it, it’s called hammering, it’s actually grinding it up. They grind it up twice, double hammering. So it’s a little bit thinner, it applies a little bit easier. They have a single hammered mulch, but you get a lot of longer sticks and things in it. So we provide, when I first came on, we could only provide one load of compost, one load of mulch a year. Now the budget’s been more friendly to us and we pretty much provide it on demand. And that makes it a good customer service thing. People need it, then they keep going forward with their gardening, you know. So it’s a good thing.

Johnathan Glover
Okay. And what was I about to ask? So with them being able to like, well usually with mulch, is it harder for them to like, tend to their crops? Because you know, it’s like a protective layer almost. So does that like hurt against the hydration of plants and things like that?

Tim Turton 00:19:34
That’s a great question. Double hammered mulch is positive and not so positive in this regard. It holds in moisture. The problem is it holds in moisture. So especially in this cool weather, you want the ground to breathe a little bit, you know, because in case we get a couple inches of rain or something. So we have a lot of gardeners that don’t use it, but we have a lot of gardeners that do use it. We have a lot of gardeners, Reedy Creek Community Garden, which is almost twice as big as this garden. It’s humongous. They like wood chips. And one of the reasons, two reasons, because it’s lighter, it’s easier for the gardeners to load it up in a wheelbarrow and use it. And plus it decomposes faster. That sounds counter-intuitive, but they like doing it that way. So yeah, it just depends. But if you look around, hardly anybody uses mulch here. They’ve hardly ever asked us to drop mulch. Those piles of wood chips are from some of our friendly tree contractors that show up unannounced. And dump all these loads on us that we can’t use. That’s another issue for another day, maybe, but sometimes we end up putting signs out to the tree companies not to dump mulch.

Johnathan Glover
And is that, like, I’m guessing that’s a problem at every community? Tim Not at everyone, but at a few.

Johnathan Glover
Okay. So my next question is, are they using, with mulch, mulch can be used in many different ways. Are they using it mainly for the promotion of their plant growth, or are they using it more for aesthetic reasons?

Tim Turton 00:21:11
I think that they’re using it to control moisture, to control weeds more than the aesthetic. And those two factors are good reasons to use it. So let me, before I forget to, let me tell you what else we provide. We provide the land, we provide the fence, we provide the water, we provide the compost and mulch, slowly but surely where we can, we’re pouring concrete pads so that the mulch and the compost states clean from weeds, and it’s easier for everybody to use. It’s a good thing for the citizens. Now I know everybody’s a taxpayer, and the taxes contribute to this, but I think Mecklenburg County does a really nice thing for the gardeners in this county, if they want to, you know, garden in our community gardens. Yeah. So we make repairs, all kinds of things, so it’s good.

Johnathan Glover 00:22:13
Gotcha. So let’s circle back to the whole frame building. So are there regulations that the gardeners must go by when, because I know y’all don’t build all of the garden beds, so are they set to certain restrictions?

Tim Turton
Thats a good question. What we try to do, let’s just say somebody had a big plot, 30 foot by 20 foot, and they leave us. We try to divide that into at least two new plots. So if Jonathan, you want a plot at Reedy Creek, we’ll say, yeah, these plots are available, they’re 10 by 15, do you want one? Or we may divide it into three plots and say we have eight by 10 plots available. Now do we build boxes there? Usually not. We’re just doing this here, this is a particular circumstance. And we have another place that’s a particular circumstance, so we’re going to build some boxes. And so people make a choice. Some people just like to shovel cut edge around, mound it up like that and grow right on the ground. Some people bring concrete blocks, some people bring wood. And it works, that approach works.

Johnathan Glover 00:23:22
So are they like, so you got different types of ways to prevent weeds and stuff like that. Are they just using mainly mulch or are they using sheets to put under the soil? I know that will cause problems as far as irrigation and stuff like that.

Tim Turton
Well there’s very little bona fide irrigation in the community garden system. Lincoln Heights on their own through a city grant and the knowledge to do it, put irrigation in all their boxes. But I think that’s the only one. We try to have faucet, hoses available nearby within like say 75 feet, so 75 foot hose will reach or even 50 feet. But as far as putting any kind of ground cloth to inhibit weeds, that’s the gardener’s choice. A lot of gardeners don’t even use mulch, they just hand weed. They just come so frequently that they keep up with it.

Johnathan Glover 00:24:28
Okay, that’s good. So with that, are they like, have you ever seen anybody use any type of cover crop?

Tim Turton
You’re right on top of it, dude. No, we have not, but we have just reopened a new community garden because we, Mecklenburg County renovated the whole park. It’s a major park now, it’s called Druid Hills. It’s off of Statesville Road. It just opened a week ago. And we rebuilt the whole community garden. And so it’s so new that Scott and I went in and planted crimson clover throughout the 30 beds that are there. And because we don’t know how many gardeners we’re going to get in yet, we have four or five right now. So we’ve got a ways to go to fill that place up. So we’re trying to help inhibit the weeds, and we’ll see how it goes.

Johnathan Glover
Right.

Tim Turton
It came up real fast, but the cold weather’s moved in, so we don’t know what’s going to happen.

Johnathan Glover 00:25:28
Okay, and that was going to bring me into our next question. How would this space operate with the season change? I mean, we come to the end of the season, some plants are like, time for them to come up actually. And how would the planters or the garden master, leads, masters? The master gardeners?

Tim Turton
Master gardeners.

Johnathan Glover
How would they run the space during that time?

Tim Turton
Well, think about gardeners as chefs. Everybody has their own way of doing things, and so everybody does their own thing. Like, for example, this box over here has all lettuce in it. If it’s not such a horrible cold winter, that lettuce will make it through the whole winter. What are the odds? Well, they’re taking a chance. Pepper plants live until frost, and actually a lot of us think peppers taste better when they get the Christmas, the crispness of the fall evenings. And so there’s some pepper plants around here. So everybody does differently. The only thing that we ask is that it’s cleaned up. This is a public place, especially there’s community gardens that are even in a more public place. Like, for example, Clarks Creek Community Garden, which is smaller than this, but very active. They’re in Clarks Creek Park, which is a very active park. A lot of people walk past the community garden. We like for that to be as clean as possible. And so, again, everybody’s on their own. Now, if we came back in a month here, and some of these gardens here, like, they just, you know, didn’t care about their pepper plants. They all died. It’s looking pretty bad. We would need to notify them that it’s really time to clean up or you might lose your plot. And that’s where the spring and fall volunteer days come in. It’s such a great thing, these work days, because then people get into starting at square one again with their garden plots. So it works out pretty well.

Johnathan Glover 00:27:29
So do the participants do their time in the garden carry over into the next year? Tim: You are allowed to keep your plot until in perpetuity, so to speak, as long as you take care of it. Now, is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? I don’t know, but that’s the way it’s always been. And rarely we get some pushback on that, because sometimes we have a pretty robust waiting list at a garden that people want to get in. And so that may be when we decide to find the money to build another garden, not so far away. That hasn’t quite happened yet, but I can see that happening in the future. In a particular place in the south side of Charlotte. Also, what we do is we turn the water off soon, and sometime in November the water goes off and sometime in April it goes back on. Because there’s something called a backflow preventer. We don’t want that to break. We don’t want that to…

Johnathan Glover 00:28:25
What is that? The backflow preventer?

Tim Turton
In theory, it prevents any kind of pollution from going from the hose into the city water system. So it prevents backflow into the city water system. It gets just the water right there. And it’s a regulation that’s all over town. It’s not just the gardens. So we just don’t want anything to freeze out and crack and all that.

Johnathan Glover
Right.

Tim Turton
And it rains, and it’s cold, and all that good stuff this time of year.

Johnathan Glover
So with that, are they like… I’m guessing they all take their own safety measures when it comes to outside factors such as rodents and insects.

Tim Turton
That’s another good question. Okay, so we… Right up top in the rules, we say, you know, this be aware of animals. Be aware of yellow jackets. Be aware of snakes. That’s all we can suggest as you need to be aware. We have two community gardens. Scott I have encountered copperheads. The smaller ones you can put on a shovel and take to the woods. The bigger ones that don’t want to move, you have to do something more drastic. Yellow jackets can be a real issue in August and September. You got to kind of look out for their little hole in the ground. Because they’re forging to move, and they are very nasty at that time. Poison Ivy, all that. People need to think about it.

Johnathan Glover 00:30:03
So how would what do you recommend for them to do?

Tim Turton
I would recommend for them to understand the seasons. Like fire ants are an issue. Now we will come out when we can, or we will leave them a product to treat fire ants. That can be a really big problem sometimes because they love fertile soil. And this is where they might be. Exactly. Sometimes we ask the garden captains to remind people, you know, as you’re getting in the summer, look out for snakes, look out for bees, look out for poison ivy. We don’t always do that. I probably sometimes need to work on a yearly reminder. It might be good to put a little fact sheet out. That’s probably what I’ll do. I’ll put it on the website.

Johnathan Glover
Sounds good. And then I want to go back to the whole corn thing, because you said something about how it was like maybe some African people who had grown different types of corn, then different types of spinach. Are there other different cultures and people that grow any different exotic type of non-native plants here? Or any other garden?

Tim Turton
I am not sure about that, but let’s call this a southern culture thing. They grow peanuts here. And in Reedy Creek, there you grow, peanuts. I knew it was Georgia and all that, they grow peanuts, but it works. I don’t know. Sweet potatoes are a really common thing that people grow. And really, you can get in a really nice quantity of sweet potatoes. I don’t think that there’s any, there’s a gardener in a cell, a community garden that loves the hottest peppers you can imagine, has a whole array of them. And so something’s going on there.

Johnathan Glover 00:32:04
So I know that you guys are very active within Charlotte. And I actually recently had an interview with Charlotte Greens, and with a person specifically named Rosalind Cissy Shull.

Tim Turton
Cissy, you know her very well.

Johnathan Glover
So how is, what would you say, how has that worked out for Mecklenburg County?

Tim Turton
The only way we connect is that she has two gardens that are within our community garden system, Irwin Community Garden and Southside. And so we provide compost and mulch there, we make repairs there. We just help them as they need it. Like for instance, Irwin is a special circumstance about the boxes. They’re probably 15 years old. They’re rotted, they’re falling apart. We’re going to replace those sometime this winter. And one of the reasons is Irwin is a true community garden. Cissy gets plants from a nursery. They grow, it’s such a beautiful place in the summer. They grow so many plants, and they give most of them away. They give them to hospice and other organizations. And so they’re such an outreach garden, we feel like we should be helping them. But otherwise, Cissy, you know, she’s fantastic, and they’ve got community gardens here and there. Yeah, that’s a real good thing.

Johnathan Glover 00:33:28
Have y’all interacted with other community gardens within the Charlotte region?

Tim Turton
Not really. Sometimes we get people wonder, Oakhurst, I see a community garden off of Oakhurst Avenue. I’d like to get a plot. And I say, “That’s really the city. You need to contact the city of Charlotte.” My understanding is the city has started building community gardens, but I don’t really know. I don’t have anything factual to tell you on that. And churches build their own gardens. Now, there is a gentleman, a county employee, Reggie Singleton, works for the health department. He’s a great guy. His objective in his job is to build as many small community gardens that can be used, especially in food deserts. He also has, for a long time, been the motivator in the leader of a garden called Males Place at Fred Alexander Park, which has taken young men, it’s a big garden too, and assigned them sections of the garden, which is the responsibility, because gardening is timing. You’ve got to water when it’s time to water. You’ve got to weed when it’s time to weed. You’ve got to harvest when it’s time to harvest. And they have different sections. They used to be named from African tribes, I think, or African kings, I can’t remember. And the garden is amazing. It’s just amazing. You should go there sometime.

Johnathan Glover
Yes, sir.

Tim Turton
And he’s done that for a long time. Him and his buddy Bill Sloan, they go out to behind rec centers and they’ll build eight to ten small boxes. They’re at a church. They’ll build eight to ten small boxes. And actually Scott and I have to reach out every so often and help the recreation centers. We help them with they don’t have time to weed it, or can you get us some plants. So Bill Sloan, who is a volunteer, another great guy, works at Reggie, there is a greenhouse at North County Jail off of Spector Avenue. And we help them with the greenhouse, Scott and I. And when he can get young inmates clear to help him, they go and plant the seeds. But that’s a hit or miss thing. So most of the time lately, Scott and I have been the one planting the seeds. When they’re ready to get moved, we come pick them up. We tell the rec centers they’re ready. We lay them out at the office. They come and get them. Sometimes something happens and it doesn’t work out so well. So we reach out that way to the rec centers. And that’s another good thing because, for example, at Mallard Creek Rec Center, they used to have senior programs and then they would have a senior lunch or dinner with their harvest. That was kind of fun. So yeah.

Johnathan Glover 00:36:14
So are these, I know you mentioned how Boy Scouts build and you got different schools who participate in the gardens. So are the garden spaces like, does the community outreach depend on where the garden is?

Tim Turton
It just, there’s no, what am I trying to say here? There’s no program that encourages outreach. Like let’s bring the Boy Scouts in to do this. It’s more like somebody contacts us and said, “I work with this organization. We’d like to do a volunteer day at a certain community garden. What could we do to help?” Again, I don’t know how we would encourage that, but we do use volunteers. There are, like Lincoln Heights, which we, Great Garden Cap, is there. They have a schedule and like about every three weeks they do a half-full work day on Saturday. And our volunteer coordinator, Karen Howard, gets them volunteers. So there may be a dozen people there that day. And so over here we’ve had Karen get volunteers for them, volunteers on this last work day. And so it’s out there, the idea is out there, but we don’t really publicize it like maybe we should.

Johnathan Glover 00:37:39
So with the expansion, trying to basically get a community garden one per year, like have you ever, like, has there been years that you haven’t expanded or that you’ve expanded more than what you thought you would?

Tim Turton
You know, the Park of Recreation gets so much pressure from so many organizations, soccer, pickleball, senior programs, new rec centers, that it just depends on budget. But it’s out there, the idea is out there. Elmar Road Park is getting renovated. It’s in the plan to build a community garden. I hope the money stays there to build that one, because it’s needed on that side of town. We may be building another one in the south if the money comes across. Because it’s more than just, you know, creating a plot of land with fencing on it. You’ve got to bring in water, you’ve got to get permitting, all kinds of different things. If you’re going to build the original boxes, you’ve got to do that. So nothing’s simple. Got you.

Johnathan Glover 00:38:39
So with that how does the funding work? Like, are the gardens allocated a certain amount of funding, or do they pick and pull from the bunch?

Tim Turton
When I was a manager of the HORT team, we had our own budget. I managed that budget with this part-time job. I don’t really want to get into that. I just want to do the work, reach out to the public. So I asked my boss, can we do this? 99% of the time he says yes, and we go. That long-term conversation, or do we have $50,000 to build a new community garden? I don’t really get into that. I don’t really get into encouraging community gardens, but I can work 20 hours a week, and that’s it. And so I got to maximize it out here.

Johnathan Glover 00:39:15
That’s understandable. Yeah. So I’m not going to try to hold up too much of your time, so I’m going to get you with these concluding statements.

Tim Turton
All right.

Johnathan Glover
Concluding questions.

Tim Turton
All right.

Johnathan Glover 00:39:41
So reflecting on these questions, what are your thoughts on the community gardens?

Tim Turton
I think the community gardens are awesome. I think that they’re a vital part of the neighborhood that they’re in. I think expansion would be a good idea. I hope that happens. I do think honestly, if there’s expansion, it may come to a point where Park and Rec has to hire full-time, because there’s always pressures on us. But no, it needs to happen. It’s a great thing for people to eat fresh and to eat organic. It’s fantastic.

Johnathan Glover
And how has this impacted you?

Tim Turton
Gets me up in the morning. And I got to work with this dog over here, Scott, so that’s another way it impacts me. And it’s a good thing. We’ve learned a lot about working with the public and doing our little junior carpentry stuff that we do. And it feels good to come out in the middle of the summer and see all these wonderful plants growing. So yeah, it’s impacted me in a good way. I’ve been a gardener for 40 years personally, so it’s good to see this.

Johnathan Glover
Oh, do you mind if I get your age real quick?

Tim Turton
72.

Johnathan Glover
72? Got you. You definitely don’t look 72. Y’all don’t move like…

Scott
There’s 72 going on.

Tim Turton
We can’t remember, that’s the problem. So that’s… okay, well I appreciate you coming out.

Johnathan Glover
Of course. I thank you for the time out.

Tim Turton
You’re very welcome. I hope you’re everything in the past with flying colors.

Johnathan Glover
Thank you.

Tim Turton
Good to meet you.

Johnathan Glover
Good to meet you too.