October 27, 2026 Membership Meeting
Alliance members held their monthly meeting on October 27 at Old City Gardens, a green pocket tucked into the edge of downtown at 300 E. Depot Avenue. The garden sits on a little more than half an acre behind Knox Rail Salvage, where East Depot Avenue dead-ends at the concrete wall of James White Parkway.
Kathy McGinnis hosted the Alliance members and led the discussion, giving members a closer look at how the garden works, its challenges, and what it takes to keep a growing space thriving in the middle of the city.
A hardware store once stood at the site of the garden before it was torn down in the mid-2000s to make way for the parkway, and the lot sat as an odd stretch of grass for years.
That changed in April 2016, when the garden held its official groundbreaking as the city’s newest community garden and the one closest to downtown.
The garden started as a partnership between Brenna Wright, at that time owner of the Parkridge urban farm Abbey Fields, and Jenny and Randy Boyd, who own the property. The Boyds took inspiration from Boston’s Fenway Victory Gardens. At opening, the plan called for nearly 30 raised-bed plots, each 4 by 25 feet, along with a large market garden plot to grow produce for downtown restaurants. Today, approximately one-half of the garden is home to 30 raised beds that are leased annually from January 1 to December 31 for $200 per bed, and the other half is available for an appropriate person or organization to come in and clean up and garden.
Former Mayor Madeline Rogero pointed to the project as a model that could help skeptics understand what urban farming could look like, coming a year after City Council passed new zoning rules to make room for urban farms and gardens.
More than a decade later the garden still stands with a vision to continue its mission of being a model urban garden in the Old City.
