Tales From A Garden Collective

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Slugs were wooden barter coins. It’s all digital now, unfortunately.

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In this episode we learn more about community gardens with a twist.  We speak with Holli Prohaska from the Urban Farm Collective in Portland, where you don’t have to own land or even rent a community garden spot in order to participate in growing your own food, and where you may have been excited to see slugs in the past. We say, bring back the slugs!

This interview was recorded in July of 2021, so some information may be slightly out of date. Again, thank you for pudding up with our long delay in getting Season 2 ready for you! It took much more thyme than we expected.

Holli Prohaska

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Holli, out and about.

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Holli Prohaska is the Director of the Urban Farm Collective based in Portland, Oregon. Holli is originally from Portland, OR! She grew up in SE, went to college and worked for the Forest Service as a Hot Shot in Eastern Oregon and has lived in N and NE Portland for the last 23 years, where she still currently lives with her partner and two dogs. She is a Physical Education and Health teacher by trade and has been teaching for 20 years. She loves being involved with her community and has done a TON of volunteering with different organizations over the years. She loves gardening, hiking, biking, cooking, live music and drinking a good IPA!

Urban Farm Collective

The Urban Farm Collective is a fairly unique form of community gardening where people can volunteer at the farms and get “barter bucks” in return, which they can trade in for fresh produce or products made with items grown or raised on the urban farms, such as eggs, jams, or honey.  The Barter Market is located at their Bakari Garden and is open on Tuesday evenings June through October.

This model gives people who don’t own land and either don’t want to or can’t rent a community garden space the opportunity to still play in the dirt and have a hand in growing their own food. Since land access can prevent many people from being able to garden or grow their own produce, this provides an alternative to other pay to play community garden models.

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The Urban Farm Collective focuses on community building, education, and improving access to fresh and healthy food, and their goal is to grow twice as much as they need so 50% of their harvest can be donated to those organizations working to end hunger. The Urban Farm Collective provides land access; currently they operate 7 farms, located on previously vacant lots in Portland, most in formerly redlined areas<