Garden is pretty, the Board is sh*t…read more I moved out of Long Beach midseason and forgot to tell them, because I have a life, but when I was honest and asked them if I could stay, they still kicked me out, despite me spending hundreds of dollars on new plants and mulch that I just laid out. I had to remove them after my appeal to stay through the season (a mere 5 months) was denied. Long story short, they kicked me out for moving out of city lines, despite living in Long Beach for 10 years prior and paying taxes to the city for a decade. None of that mattered enough to let me finish out the season. I'm pretty sure not everyone who gardens there even lives in Long Beach and just uses their friends addresses to get a plot, but they apparently don't care to look into that too much. Part of me feels like me being kicked out was driven by ageism/racist views as I have only seen old white people in surrounding plots and at work parties (i.e. gulag camps that start at 7am hardly a "party"). The people I met at the garden have been sweet enough, but I have also seen a lot of them go away because they were also kicked out for unfair rules like weed violations (seriously, it's a garden, there's going to be weeds). Also the board hasn't changed in 8+ years, so that should tell you something about their tyrannical rule. At least change it up and have people step down for other people in the board to take charge every year, but no. Overall, the entire board has the moral backbone of a chocolate eclair. Here is an article about them that I wish I read before I started gardening here: https://www.presstelegram.com/2013/08/21/long-beach-community-garden-beset-by-weeds-of-conflict-2/

Tucked away behind the Nature Center, the SPCA, and the sprawl of El Dorado Park is the Long Beach…read moreCommunity Gardens, home to ~300 plots of garden space. The city leases the individual plots out for a nominal yearly fee (100 + about 30 for incidentals last I checked) to any resident of Long Beach who can waitlist until acceptance and then maintain the plot according to the garden's somewhat exacting standards. Several amenities supplement the invidual plots: a pile of woodchips donated from local landscaping services, a pile of horse manure from the park's Equestrian Center, wheelbarrows, and a Food Bank table that gardeners can put their excess produce on. The Food Bank donations are taken daily to various nonprofit orgs that benefit the less fortunate in our city, and are a great way to keep from wasting food when your garden gives you a little more than you bargained for. Garden inspections are every month and infractions given for a variety of offenses, and if you get too many, they kick you out. For this reason, it's a good idea to go in on it with a friend or family member, or to make friends among other gardeners, because some things require more than one pair of hands to get done, and it's more fun with company anyway. It is a LOT of work to keep up with it - the plots are 20x30, and gardeners are expected to not let them lie idle. Plots must be kept populated with seasonal edibles as well as free of weeds and other problems that can spread to other garden plots. The gardens are what I call "mostly organic" - there's a little weed killer that gets used on the common pathways, but none is used in the garden beds where the food is growing. There are several things you can't grow on your plots here. No fruit trees, no berries with thorns (ie raspberries, blackberries), no mint, no potatoes, no succulents, the list goes on. But even with those restrictions, and the strict upkeep requirements, it's still a tremendous value if you have the time and the people power to put in the hard work to grow your own nearly-organic produce.