Heritage Garden
Squash, tomatoes, salad greens, sugar snaps, melons, strawberries, cucumbers, peppers, onions, and much, much more. By mid-summer, our baskets will be overflowing with fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs, all 100% organic and grown in the Good Ground Heritage Garden at St. Joseph’s Villa. In a good year, we’ll harvest more than 1,500 pounds of this fresh produce, almost all of which will be donated to the Food Pantry at St. Rosalie’s Church in Hampton Bays.
The earth gives us so much, we try to give something back in return.
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Creating a community garden isn’t something that happens overnight. We first broke ground at St. Joseph’s Villa in 2019, clearing more than 6,000 square feet, surrounding it with deer fence, and building our first raised beds. Every year since then, we’ve kept at it, expanding and improving, adding irrigation, building trellises and more raised beds. In 2021, with a generous grant from the Michael and Annie Falk Foundation, we added a greenhouse, which allowed us to extend our growing season and improve the garden yield even further.
Of course, maintaining a community garden also takes a lot of work. At ECI we are lucky to have a great team of volunteers -- some expert gardeners, some novices -- who come together weekly, from April through October, to work the soil and learn hands-on organic gardening skills.
There’s a big payoff from all this volunteer effort. Along with the vegetables and flowers, the Heritage Garden produces a vibrant sense of community among friends and neighbors. Together we plant, weed, cultivate, harvest, and preserve produce. And alongside the plants, together we grow and reconnect with the earth.
