What better way to foster family-based community development than to restore the family's capacities to grow, harvest, preserve, eat, barter, or sell its own food? Being able to do so, of course, depends on another important asset: affordable family housing.
Nutritious vegetables can be grown in surprisingly large quantities in comparatively small spaces. A family does not have to own a farm to co-produce its own food. Family gardening can be an empowering activity for urban, as well as rural families. (Farm families who grow some food for their own tables call these gardens their "kitchen gardens").
Gardening can not only raise healthy vegetables and improve diets, it can help save money, it can bond families with their places, and it can engage family members in productive things to do together. The nutritious meals can help prevent obesity (and its many associated diseases), diabetes II, and other maladies that are becoming more common in all communities.
Moreover, family gardens and community gardens can help turn abandoned properties in distressed neighborhoods into productive, beautiful assets. Small wonder that even as family farms continue to suffer at the hands of corporate agriculture, urban agriculture is slowly on the rise. That is because families continue to recognize the importance of a healthy relationship with the land.
