Coming soon: Facebook for heirloom tomatoes. Local Grow, a website for local gardeners to share and connect, has just released its new tool, MyGarden, to make it easier for people to exchange tips and tricks for cultivating their favorite produce.
“Local Grow is about creating a tool for the community to make it easy and fun to be self-reliant and sustainable,” said founder Peter Zabelin. “I think it should be interesting to have a tool that is both useful and fun to use, to share gardening information, and down the road find local produce and collaborate and share.”
MyGarden users will be able to create virtual gardens that will mirror the fruits and vegetables they have at home. Pictures of their produce can be uploaded to the site, showcasing the leafiness of one’s lettuce and tips and tricks for getting it that way. Say you’re a pasta enthusiast looking for some fresh tomatoes for a marinara sauce—you’ll be able to find a grower nearby and even keep track of the development of his or her particular tomato plant.
Lisa Geduldig, one of the coordinators at Dearborn Community Garden, said it would be useful to connect with other community gardeners. She pointed to a blight that affected some of her fava beans, saying that she would like to know whether other gardeners are having a similar issue and how they’re taking care of it.
She also said that the feature following the growth of individual plants would be a fun tool. “When you have a garden, you can see progress in as little as two days. Where it’s three inches now, it was an inch a few days ago,” she said, speaking of her vegetable garden. “It’s pretty amazing. I mean I just planted lettuce a month ago and now I’m eating it in a salad.” Showcasing growth through photos or a time-lapse video, she said, would be a neat addition.
Zabelin also hopes to make MyGarden customizable, so that users more interested in finding farmers’ markets or gardening stores, for instance, will be able to do that without having to worry about growing information.
Geduldig thinks this aspect would be useful, and added that linking potential gardeners to community gardens would be especially important, as sfgro.org, which previously had a list of community gardens in San Francisco, has shut down.
“I think it could be great to see what community gardens exist and see available plots,” she said. “Having the list back up somewhere would be helpful for people looking for a garden.” She added that their waiting list of 180 people—18 years—would make a resource for finding other gardens extremely useful. “I had to tell a pregnant women that, ‘Yeah you can sign up, and when your kid’s out of high school we’ll have a plot.”
At the Mission’s Sunday Streets event last month, Local Grow unveiled the MyGarden tool, with a booth demonstrating the benefits of community gardening. They were even visited by California Senator Mark Leno, who planted inaugural seeds at the booth’s planter boxes to show his support for the project. Local Grow began a conversation with Senator Leno months ago that developed into his Sunday Streets visit.
Zabelin started LocalGrow after college, working with friends who knew a thing or two about technology, and going off of a few classes he had taken at College of Marin. But he’s not a techie, and hires professionals for the more complicated aspects of the website.
Instead, Zabelin comes at it from a gardener’s standpoint. “My family has always gardened and provided for themselves,” he said. “I started taking care of it once the grandparents were too old for it. And while I was maintaining it I got curious as to what other people around me were doing.” Local Grow is self-funded, and at the moment consists mostly of Zabelin’s family and friends.
Those were the seedlings, so to speak, of LocalGrow. And though MyGarden is the site’s latest feature (following the release of its first tool WikiGrow), Zabelin hopes to create a “single hub for education, sustainability, local food, health, and nutrition” so that local producers can grow food “in a sustainable and healthy manner.”
Because MyGarden is still in its alpha phase, it will be some time before it’s fully functional. But you can go to LocalGrow now and create a profile to start sharing with (and learning from) gardeners throughout the city.