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Nellie Keyes Community Garden

Rice Military Community Gardeners
Organization
Established in 1998 as a cooperative, all-organic community garden in association with Urban Harvest. We adhere to the organic principles of Urban Harvest, and we use their training and guidance to plan our garden. As a cooperative garden, we all work together. We plan together, decide what to plant together, work side by side in the entire garden, sharing tasks, and we harvest together, sharing everything. Our garden coordinator is Michael. He keeps track of the planting, rotation and fertilizing schedules in accordance with the Urban Harvest guide for planting in Houston and/or the Texas A&M Agrilife Extension Planting Calendar.
Volunteers
We are open to volunteers from Rice Military and surrounding neighborhoods. For those who have the resources to do so, we contribute $100 per household as needed for expenses. We volunteers cover all expenses, including seed, fertilizer and major equipment. The City of Houston provides the location in the park and water. The main requirement to be a volunteer is to come in a sharing, cooperative spirit.  To start, just come join us for our common work day to see what you think.
Work days/time
Our common work day is Saturday, beginning between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM, and ending before 12:00 PM noon. As volunteers become more accustomed to the planting and work routines (and can recognize seedlings and plants we want to keep), we come individually to work and harvest on our own time schedules. Because we are in Houston, we are a year-round garden. There is always something planted and being harvested year-round. But, because we work together on the whole garden, there is always someone to take care of things when volunteers are working, on vacation, or just cannot come for any period of time.
What we grow
Our best time of year is October to May. During that time, we have big harvests of greens (lettuce, collards, kale, swiss chard), root vegetables (carrots, beets, potatoes), and, in spring, tomatoes. The most difficult time of year is summer. Due to the scorching heat, our reliable crops are arugula, purple hull peas (black-eyed), eggplant, cucumbers, and okra. Year round we have great herbs: lemon grass, basil, thyme, fennel, mint, oregano, rosemary, and tarragon. We also have fruit trees inside the garden, including nectarine, papaya, kumquat, grapefruit, mandarinquat, meyer lemon and pears. We take care of the community orchard outside the garden fence, which is open to all in the community and has nectarines, mandarin oranges, plum, tangerine, mulberry and pawpaw.
For more information, please come by the garden any Saturday from 9 till noon, or
email us at: garden@ricemilitarycc.org