2024 Gardens for Good Award Recipients!
2023 Garden of the Year Award Recipients!
Through the Galvez Garden, the NOLA Artist Incubator offers educational programming to the community focused on creating sustainable art, regenerative urban vegetable gardening, and backyard composting.
“Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts.”
~ Mac Griswold
- Ethical, Sustainable Permaculture
- Educational and Community Building
- Safe Green Spaces for Urban Agriculture
- Nutritional Literacy, Food Security, Compost Collection
Transforming Spaces And Growing Green
The Galvez Garden is a not-for-profit, non commercial endeavor, solely focused on benefiting the community. This socially engaged practice project, led by our Founder and Executive Director, invites conversations about sustainability and urban agriculture within New Orleans. NOLA Artist Incubator maintains and operates the Galvez Garden and facilitates educational and Artist-in-Residence programming on site. Specific goals of the garden are to be welcoming to the community, safe and inviting for children and the elderly, and to serve as a demonstration and teaching garden for the neighborhood. Established in 2021, the Galvez Garden has grown into a micro farm, with small livestock including rabbits and chickens.
Initiated in aims to fight blight and promote shared community spaces, the Galvez Garden offers services as a teaching and demonstration garden, green space for creative activities, and serves as a compost and recycling drop off site. Neighbors are welcomed to learn about composting, growing vegetables, native landscaping, stormwater management solutions, and other permaculture projects on site.
The site is designed to mitigate flooding and act as a teaching garden, exploring a range of regenerative gardening techniques. The Galvez Garden is an opportunity to share ecological and economical ways New Orleanians can take on a more active role in storm water management and benefit from urban gardens.
Growing Food at Galvez Garden
As awardees of the 2023 Cultivating the Community Garden Grant, the Galvez Garden aimed to increase availability of fresh fruits and vegetables within underserved communities. NOLA Artist Incubator was one of six award recipients from Louisiana and South Carolina. Those funds allowed the Incubator to increase the number of families that can be fed by their community garden. With shared goals to increase access to local fresh healthy foods and food choices within food insecure communities, we are elated to have been given the opportunity to transform the Galvez Garden to provide organically grown produce to the St. Roch community.
We have enjoyed growing a productive vegetable garden area that grows food for our community, while offering inclusive opportunities for community members to learn about gardening ever since. The new garden beds provide a space for people who want to grow food in our garden to do so. The height of these beds is more accessible to people, making it more inclusive for elderly neighbors to participate in learning about and growing their own food at the Galvez Garden. In our accessible garden beds, community members are encouraged to inquire about building sustainable and regenerative urban gardening skills in the vegetable garden. In addition, the Incubator also offers educational programming to the community, focused on creating sustainable art, urban vegetable gardening, and backyard composting. We look forward to collaborating with more schools and organizations to offer enhanced programming and welcome new community partnerships.
This project was made possible with support from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) —Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and the Community Resources Connection (CRC) Inc.
Community Resources Connection (CRC) has collaborated with the United States Department of Agriculture to increase availability of fresh fruits and vegetables within underserved communities via the “Cultivating the Community” food project.
Cultivating the Community food project has assisted with increasing the accessibility of local, quality healthy food choices by distributing dollars to local community organizations to purchase materials and supplies to establish community gardens.
Building Community
Collaborating For Collective Good
The Galvez Garden is partnered with Compost NOW and is proud to be listed among several registered drop off sites throughout the city. We offer compost drop off on Sundays from 10:00-2:00 to divert food waste from our landfills. The community is welcome to drop off frozen food waste in the bins located on site. We turn over 1000 pounds of food waste into compost every 10 weeks at our site. Thanks to everyone who contributes to the cause! Over 30,000 pounds of food waste diverted from our landfills, and counting!
Recycling for Good with NOLA Cans 4 Food
In addition to collecting food scraps to be composted on site, we serve as a drop off location for recycling cans. On Sundays visitors can drop off frozen food scraps and aluminum cans that we collect in partnership with NOLA Cans 4 Food. Those cans are exchanged for funds to buy healthy ingredients – to make meals – that are donated to community fridges throughout the city.
Sundays, 10:00-2:00, bring us your waste; we’ll turn it into food.
Galvez Garden Native Plant Initiative
As recipients of a Beautification Grant from Keep Louisiana Beautiful, the NOLA Artist Incubator was selected to receive a grant in support of the organization’s belief in the power of art to transform spaces. In solidarity with the purpose of the Keep Louisiana Beautiful Beautification Grant, the purpose of the Galvez Garden Native Plant Initiative is to improve upon our beautiful, well- maintained garden to be a source of community pride and improve the appearance of the St. Roch neighborhood. We also believe that people are less likely to litter in areas that are well maintained and beautiful, so by improving our existing public pocket park in a highly visible area, we have reduced litter in our community. Our project aimed to add more native plants, (specifically Louisiana Super Plants to the main entrance and sidewalk area of the Galvez Garden); to add a bamboo privacy wall and hardscaping to define the entrance; and to add signage to the garden. Native plants have the ability to pull and store excess carbon, in addition to adding beauty to the site. By adding more native plants we are directly helping the environment, preventing water run-off, and improving air quality.
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NOLA Artist Incubator 