When events happen in threes, it's more than a coincidence. It's a blog topic.

     I discovered my beloved red peppers, a food I throw in nearly every dish, now sell for over $4 for two at my local Trader Joe's.  The highly necessary summer herb, basil—easy-to-grow, prolific basil—now goes for about $3 a bunch. Then, in the same week while jogging on our local bike path, I also discovered did a a former homely, unloved lot now bursting with vegetables and bright perennial blooms.  An idea was born.


  With the price of many staples and favorites beginning to soar, people are inevitably looking for another way to feed their families and have hit upon an idea as old as, well, human civilization: Getting together to till the earth and harvest the crops. Voila: Community gardens. Correspondent Erin Hayes reported on ABC News last week that 20,000 community gardens now occupy sizable space in urban areas and small towns.

But I'm no gardener, you might be saying. How can I do such a thing?

 It turns out, there's a whole association devoted to community gardening. (This also indicates there's enough interest in this topic to actually merit an entire association.)  The American Community Gardening Association's website can point you to the nearest plot in your area where you can take up shovel and join the dig.  But if there are no local gardens, you and some neighbors can start one yourselves. Their website also has a detailed roadmap on creating a community garden.

 Here's a quick Shared Space cheat sheet to get you going.

Community Gardening Tips: 

1. Find an abandoned or empty plot in your area and determine who owns it by checking with your City Hall or county government. Public land will require either permission or a lease agreement.
2. Make sure the site gets at least six hours of sunlight a day and has access to water (or water can easily be transported to the lot).
3. Think about past use of the land. A former dump site might not be the best option considering the inevitable seepage from discarded Windex bottles and Tide containers.
4. Organize a meeting of would-be gardeners and make plans. Does the group want to raise vegetables? Fruit? Flowers? All of the above? I'd even suggest hosting a kick-off "Garden Party" to make the whole thing a bit more festive.
5. Divvy up the plots and clearly mark which section goes to which farmer.  Outline the plots with something permanent, yet gentle, like string tied around stakes.
6. Determine who does what. Will you operate on a "To Each His Own" policy? Or will you divide the tilling, hoeing, weeding, and picking tasks in a democratic way?
7. Perhaps most importantly, who gets to eat the fruits of all this labor? Shall each gardener reap what she sows? Or will your plots be more of a free-for-all?Or perhaps you'll harvest a charity garden and give your veggies away.

Aside from knowing exactly where you food is coming from and paying next to nothing for it, group gardening could also be a lot of fun, even a real bonding experience for your neighborhood. Personally, getting my hands dirty and planting seeds makes me feel like a kid again. I grew up in the rolling hills of western Kentucky where gardens are a source of bragging rights. When it came to produce, my parents operated on a barter system: Four quarts of our strawberries for a bushel of your corn. I don't think I ate a canned vegetable until college. And I'm sure my mother never paid, when all was said and done, over a nickel for a red pepper.  I mean--$3 for a bunch of basil?

It's enough to make me return to my roots.