Community Garden Helping Haddock Residents Eat Healthy

HADDOCK, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) — A community garden may not mean much to those of us who live near grocery stores, but for some residents in one Haddock community it’s their only option for healthy eating.

Calvin Middlebrooks walks up to a garden in his Haddock neighborhood every few days to grab all different kinds of vegetables, but when he first helped plant the food he now enjoys he wasn’t so confident there’d be anything to eat!

“We had such a good time planting, and we thought that it wasn’t going to grow, but it fooled all of us,” said Middlebrooks.

Back in April, about 40 people from Keep Jones County Beautiful, Jordan Chapel, other local churches, and residents like Lourine Hogan all helped plant the seeds for a community garden.

“There’s a lot of people in this community that basically don’t have any transportation to go and get vegetables, so this garden, it helped a lot,” said Hogan.

It’s what KJCB executive director, Steven Smith, calls a food desert. It’s a place where people don’t have the resources, or the money to fill up on foods packed with nutrients.

“You end up with health problems, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, all those sorts of things that are affecting our whole nation become really concentrated in these areas,” said Smith.

That’s just one reason Smith set his sights on Haddock as the first spot in Jones County for a community garden.

“There’s a one to one ratio as you increase green space, you decrease vandalism, crime, and things like that,” said Smith.

He hopes to spread the green space to other areas.

“This becomes a place where they can walk to get fresh fruit and vegetables and they also gain ownership in planting it themselves, working it themselves, sort of take care of it,” said Smith.

Members of the Jordan Chapel Church, and the community are also working to turn the school where it’s planted into the Haddock Community Enrichment Center.

Smith says there they’ll have things like cooking and nutrition classes to enhance the growing experience!

While some gardens can cost thousands of dollars to get up and running, Smith boasts, this one cost just $75 and a whole lot of man power!