Community Corner

Community Garden to Promote Sustainability, Self-Sufficiency

With the price of food going up and quality going down, Robert Boone said it's best to be prepared.

If disaster strikes, College Park resident Robert Boone will be ready.

Boone, 71, is starting a community garden near his home at 52nd Avenue near Narragansett Run. He already has a quarter acre plot of land established; now he’s working on getting grants from the city to build a fence and set up a system to pump water from the stream.  He came to Tuesday night’s city council meeting to inquire after his grant application, but no matter: he’s starting the garden, with or without the money.

As he put it, “the cycles of the planet don’t wait for grants.”

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Boone, who founded the Anacostia Watershed Society in 1988, is starting the garden because he doesn’t care for the direction that food production in the United States is going. He said he has a strong feeling that the price of food is going to rise while the quality goes down.

Boone intends to lead by example, teaching people how to garden, as well as offer classes in preserving food by canning and drying.

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Everyone should have a food stash in case of emergency, "so there won’t be too many people running around trying to steal from each other,” he said.

What type of emergency?

“Look at the news!,” he said. “You name it. I don’t know what might happen. We’ve been very fortunate and blessed in America to avoid many of these things that are happening, but it’s wise to be prepared.”

Boone already has some 200 seedlings sprouting in a greenhouse near his home. His crop includes collards, spinach, four kinds of onions and radishes. Squash is growing in the ground nearby, and is currently around 6 inches tall.

Boone will be recruiting local scout chapters to help with the gardening, as well as members of the community and volunteers from Meals on Wheels, where much of the food will go. The rest of it will be given to volunteers or sold at local markets. Either way, Boone said, the process will be completely organic from start to finish.

Because summer temperatures tend to be too severe for new seedlings, Boone said he is working to get the garden off the ground now, so that the sprouts will be less fragile and better equipped to handle the heat.

Plots of the garden will be available to members of the community for around $30 each. Those interested can call Boone directly at (301) 982-0170.

In addition to growing food, Boone said he’s also preparing for impending emergencies in other ways, and is working on finding alternatives to existing currency and modes of transportation in the event of a total shut down.

“I don’t want to appear as an alarmist,” he said. “But a prudent person these days would want to be as self-sufficient as possible.


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