The Trigg County Cooperative Extension Service in partnership  with the Trigg County Senior Citizens Center have worked to provide our community members with many opportunities to improve their quality of life by encouraging healthy habits.  One of these projects is a community garden located by the pavilion at the senior center.

2021 will be the sixth year of the garden project started at the Trigg County Senior Citizens center.  The project began with an idea and a trailer load of tires from our conservation districts tire amnesty day.  Several tires were cut and arranged at the senior center to make a tiered raised bed for growing vegetables.  

Since starting the project we have grown our garden to include Berries, beans, cucurbits, and sweetcorn.  Community members helping with the garden also learned about how to use plastic ground covers for weed control, learned how to ID several common garden weeds, diseases and pests.  They have also seen firsthand the importance of rotating locations for disease control.   Many of the community members who helped or worked in the Sr. Center garden took some of the ideas home with them.   The plastic ground cover was probably the biggest success for people with gardens at home, it saves worlds of time weeding and reduces the need for irrigation dramatically.  Another favorite was the use of stock panels set in a row and used to hold up the tomatoes and cucumbers. Most had never seen cucumbers grown upright but everyone appreciated it when time came to start picking!  We also were able to host some of our FFA students as a part of their SAE at the garden, they assisted with planting, weeding, harvesting and cleanup in the fall. 2020 brought us many new visitors and many new gardeners to our community gardens.  While we were limited on our contact with folks and the Sr. Center closed to recreation most of the year I expected our garden to be deserted.  In the end we actually had more community members visit, harvest produce and take Ideas home with them.  Plans are in the works to start another garden in town at Genesis Express for 2021.

Some of the vegetables grown in the garden were also incorporated into recipes and demonstrations by our Snap- Ed instructor and our FCS agent. Everyone involved with any part of the project has reported that they’ve enjoyed working in the garden, and learning more about the plants there.  It has been a great way to get some of our citizens back outside and moving during the summer months, the produce they take home is also a bonus.