Cape Canaveral Community Garden
CONTRIBUTING WRITER: Zach Eichholz, Sustainability Program Manager, City of Cape Canaveral
The Cape Canaveral Community Garden is the centerpiece of the City’s urban agriculture and sustainability efforts. Built in 2016, the Community Garden holds swaths of herbs, fruits, and vegetables across 12 large beds. Surrounded by Florida natives, bee hotels and a Little Free Library, the garden enjoys healthy community support and appreciation.
Community gardening – and gardening in general – is essential in the time of COVID-19 as it could help provide food to gardeners and their families while also supplying a safe and socially distant open air environment for education and enrichment to people of all ages.
The Community Garden is a living project in that it is never truly finished and is always changing for the better. New crops are grown, artwork is installed, and different flowers bloom. To that end, over the next few weeks City Staff will be building a pergola with a 100 square foot roof designed specifically to capture rainwater. This will help the garden to become more self-sufficient and sustainable by reducing outside water demand while decreasing the amount of Staff time devoted to refilling the existing water infrastructure. A 500-gallon storage tank will be placed underneath the pergola that will be connected to a downspout and gutter that will funnel rainwater from the pergola’s roof into the tank. Gardeners will be able to access this stored water through a common spigot. Existing rain barrels onsite will be used as overflow storage for excess rainwater should the 500-gallon tank ever become full. On average, the City of Cape Canaveral receives 52 inches of rainfall per year. With a 100 square foot roof, one inch of rain will deliver 62.3 gallons of freshwater. Two inches of rain will deliver 124.6 gallons. The pictures shown here are of the pergola at the Ethos Community Garden at Florida Tech. Cape Canaveral’s Community Garden pergola is based off the school’s plans so the finished structure will look very similar.
This 500-gallon tank is already on site. Currently it is manually refilled using a City water trailer to provide subterranean irrigation to each of the garden’s 12 beds on a timer. As stated, this tank will be moved under the pergola to hold rainwater. The existing subterranean irrigation system will be hooked back up to a previously capped reclaim line for additional watering needs. Between 2016 and 2019 the garden’s primary irrigation system utilized reclaim water provided from the City’s nearby Water Reclamation Facility. Subterranean reclaim irrigation of crops has been done at other community gardens around the country to great success as a way to reduce potable water consumption. To learn more about reclaimed water irrigation check out this link provided by UF/IFAS: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/SS/SS54400.pdf
