Coppell Community Garden Celebrates 25+ Years of Growing and Giving Back

COPPELL– The path winding through the Coppell Community Garden’s Helping Hands Garden at Town Center invites visitors to stroll through and admire the vines climbing up trellises and ripe vegetables peeking out of the raised beds. 

The first seed was planted there in 1998 with the hope of bringing the community together in a positive and visible way. Now, 26 years later, with three gardens, a greenhouse and countless dedicated volunteers, the Coppell Community Garden (CCG) donates several thousand pounds of organic produce each year and has become the how-to guide for creating and maintaining a successful community garden project.

City backed, volunteer built requested by the City Manager, Mayor, and City Council, the idea for a community garden took off quickly starting with a designated city staff member, site selection, and a public meeting. That meeting helped form the steering committee and before long, the group broke ground at Helping Hands Garden in April 1998. An event encouraging interested community members to adopt a plot at the new garden brought in the CCG’s pioneer gardeners, who dug, built and planted the blank slate into the beginnings of the thriving garden seen today.

Diane Lowe, garden manager at Helping Hands, started by adopting a plot 24 years ago. After taking a city-sponsored composting class and learning more about the process as well as the CCG itself, she decided to jump in.

“I was new in town and looking for a way to give back and meet people in the community,” she said. “Organic food and gardening were interesting to me, so I thought it would be a good place to start.”

The adopt-a-plot concept was introduced in the CCG’s infancy and is still in effect today simply because it works, Lowe said. The method ensures plots don’t become neglected and bare or overgrown, and when the garden is short on gardeners, others offer to foster a plot to keep it producing until an interested adopter comes along. Teamwork makes the dream work when it comes to maintaining a garden plot. Gardeners often form groups of three to set up a watering system and help share the workload.

“It’s a lot of hard work, and I think people underestimate that,” Lowe said. “It’s really manageable, but you have to participate.”

Seeds are planted in the plots at all three gardens — Helping Hands, Ground Delivery next to the post office on Denton Tap, and Old Town near Coppell Senior Center on Bethel Road — but the majority of what is harvested starts as a transplant from the CCG’s greenhouse. Located next to the Old Town garden, the greenhouse was built in 2019 and produces about 30,000 seedlings annually to help support the gardens, physically and financially, through plant sales at the Coppell Farmers Market twice a year. Grants, donations, and support from the City of Coppell round out the 501(c)3 non-profit’s coffers to help keep them afloat. 

Once the greenhouse transplants and seeds have matured in the plots, it’s harvest time. Saturday mornings are full of activity at the gardens, where the volunteers pick and pack up pounds of eggplant, tomatoes, greens, peppers, and much more for donation to Metrocrest Services, a local organization that provides support to those in need, including access to a food pantry. This arrangement with Metrocrest was established early on to help put the “community” in community gardening by supporting a local food pantry and providing a greater purpose for the gardeners. 

The first year, the CCG donated a few hundred pounds of fresh organic produce to Metrocrest. Each of the last several years, that annual amount has grown to more than 20,000 pounds for a total of 375,842 pounds of produce donated in the garden’s 26-year history.

“What brings a community together is a common goal,” Lowe said. “We feel good about it and these folks in need are getting healthy organic produce that will potentially help lift them out of crisis.”

While the bounty is solely reserved for Metrocrest, it soon attracted the attention of residents who were interested in buying the produce. This spawned the idea for the Coppell Farmers Market, which celebrated its 20-year milestone last year and has become an integral part of the community.

Organic Education

After many years in the gardens, Lowe developed the original planting plan and put it into action at Helping Hands in 2020. The plan acts as a roadmap, taking the guesswork out of what, where and how to plant, giving new and inexperienced gardeners the confidence to get started and the encouragement to keep going.

“It has been immensely successful and has increased production dramatically,” Lowe said. “Just about everybody is now on that plan, and we’ve developed two more to help with crop rotation.”

While the planting plan itself came from trial and error, education has always been at the heart of the CCG. Many gardeners, including Lowe, started at one of the CCG’s composting classes. In addition to composting, rainwater harvesting, organic gardening and lawn care and soil amendment classes are also offered at the Biodiversity Education Center seasonally, through a partnership with Keep Coppell Beautiful.

The gardens and those who tend them have also become educators by providing an outlet for various scout projects over the years, as well as opening the door to organic gardening for local schools. Students from Coppell Independent School District have adopted plots, then brought back what they learned back to their schools and created their own gardens. The CCG supports them by providing transplants from the greenhouse, and the students are able to see the process from garden to table by introducing new foods they’ve grown into the cafeterias.

“We’re able to teach kids at an early age how to grow their own food and give back to the community at the same time,” Lowe said.

In addition to its mission to provide educational opportunities and organic produce for those in need, the CCG also offers two scholarships to local high school seniors each year encouraging the next generation to step up at the CCG.

Be a Part of the Legacy 

The Coppell Community Garden provides a way to connect with neighbors, give back to the community, learn something new and grow in more ways than one. After two and a half decades of successfully addressing growing pains and learning from mistakes, the CCG has helped feed thousands of people and influenced community gardens all over the state. 

“It’s common to see the remnants of an abandoned community garden that didn’t pan out,” Lowe said. “In 26 years, we’ve never let that happen. That’s why we need to keep attracting and getting new people involved and oriented toward how to operate it successfully. We still want to be here in another 26 years.”

View the CCG’s planting plan, learn more about its history, and register to adopt-a-plot at coppellcommunitygarden.org.

SOURCE City of Coppell