A Visit to Meadowbrook Community Garden
This week on Mid-American Gardener, Tinisha takes us out of the studio and into the sunshine at Meadowbrook, one of Urbana’s oldest and largest organic community gardens, where folks have been growing since the mid-1970s. If you’re short on yard space (or stuck with too much shade), this place is basically garden heaven.
Meadowbrook offers over 100 plots—half plots, full plots, and special perennial plots for returning gardeners who want to grow year-round instead of just March through November. Everything here is strictly organic: no synthetic pesticides and not even plastic tarps, to avoid microplastics in the soil. Gardeners get a lot for their plot fee: access to water and hoses, plus compost, mulch, and manure brought in as needed, and a communal toolbox stocked with shared tools (operating on a bit of an honor system). he flat fee and deposit help cover things like compost and water; the deposit rolls over if you come back the next year gets refunded if you take a break.
The demand shows how popular the program is: all 104 plots are sold out for the season. Returning gardeners get first dibs in December, and then in January the sign-ups open to new gardeners—and there’s a big rush to grab a spot. You don’t have to live in Urbana either; anyone from surrounding towns can sign up if they’re willing to make the drive.
Beyond the veggies, the real payoff is community. People come for fresh, healthy produce, but they also end up meeting neighbors they might never otherwise run into. The age range is wide: some gardeners have been here since the garden first opened in the mid-1970s, and others are newer, younger gardeners who found their way to gardening more recently. Some harvests go straight to home kitchens, while others are shared with friends, coworkers, and local organizations like CU Public Health and Gracia through partners such as Solidarity Gardens and Cunningham Township.
Finally, we head over to the Meadowbrook Learning Gardens to meet Celia, a Uof I intern working with the “Back to School” program. Her plot is both a garden and a research site: she’s studying purslane as a living mulch while also surveying insects, using okra as the main crop. One bed is a control with no purslane, which she weeds regularly, and another bed is intentionally intercropped with purslane to see if it suppresses other weeds and affects pollination. She visits two to four times a week to water and weed, and weekly data collection starts soon; once that begins, she’ll stop weeding the purslane bed and see what happens over the summer.
Last year’s version of the experiment ran into a snag when the team ordered purslane seed and ended up with ornamental purslane that grows upright instead of low and spreading. This year, they foraged wild purslane from around town—the same stuff that pops up in sidewalk cracks—and plan to “give it a haircut” down to two or three inches once it hits six, encouraging it to spread low across the soil. The project runs through the summer and will wrap up with an August 5 presentation through the Community-Academic Scholars program and the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute, plus a group paper.
Celia says working in a community garden adds a real-world layer you just don’t get from textbooks: mentors like Anthony and Emily bring practical experience, and the hands-on work reveals tips and tricks that never show up in lectures. The team is also tracking how purslane affects insect life—what predators it attracts, what herbivores it might distract from the okra, and whether that ends up helping or hurting the crop.
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