My Container Garden and Monticello Ave Community Garden

Monticello is a street next to where I live. I've driven up and down it many times. For some reason, the other day I was looking up community gardens around my area. I was surprised to find out that Monticello had a community garden literally around the corner from where I live. Seriously, it's like a 3 minute walk. It was a surprise to me because I had never EVER before seen a garden where Google maps was telling me it was located. I had driven past that way millions of times (ok, maybe not millions), and not once did I see this mythical garden. By some stroke of luck, as I was returning home after driving my boyfriend to work, there was no parking on the street in front of where I live because it was still an early and ungodly hour. So I had to drive around the block--which forced me to drive down Monticello again. This time, I noticed an area with no cars parked in front of it and a ton of greenery. I parked my car and much to my surprise, I had found it.

Monticello Ave Community Garden

The Welcome sign.

I actually entered the garden later on in the day after taking a lovely walk with my boyfriend. It looks very different compared to UFarm. I like to think that UFarm seems a little more lively, probably because it's maintained everyday. From the look of Monticello's community garden, it wasn't being maintained on a daily basis. So there's room for growth and improvement. Here are a few pictures I took from the inside of the garden.

One of the beds in the community garden.

The pathways were pretty narrow.

They had a pretty large raspberry plant growing which I thought was really cool!

Finding the community garden was pretty lucky for me because I recently started my own container garden. I've found that its hard to grow fruiting plants in containers if the container is too small for them. Even if you think a container is large enough, sometimes it isn't. This would be a good think to research before you decide you're going to arbitrary plant it.

My container plants, which were smashed to some degree by an unknown entity. :(

Overall, the container garden started alright despite most of my plants being planted in things too small. I actually had them originally growing on my window sill but they didn't get enough light so I moved them outside next to my landlord's patio, praying that he wouldn't ask me to get rid of them. It's been almost three weeks now and nothing yet! Around week two after starting my container garden, I noticed my plants getting eaten by some unknown pests. One night, I was returning home from having dinner out with friends and I went to the back to check my plants. On one of my poor plants were EAR WIGS. They were EVERYWHERE. They were just assaulting my plants. They covered it's leaves like you couldn't even tell they were leaves anymore. Just a black glob covering my poor plants.

This is the poor plant that was assaulted by ear wigs.

And if you don't know what ear wigs are, here's a picture:

They're ugly little pests.

Anyways, I must now scour the internet for some sort of solution to my ear wig infestation. Here's a panoramic I took Monticello. 

Look, my boyfriend's enraptured by the sunlight.