Incredible Edible Park

I’m not sure how this received a positive review or how this person was allowed to pick anything from the area of the bike trail growing anything. The park was first in it’s infancy around the time the Great Park was being designed, which went from being the Irvine Great Park and ultimately the Orange County Great Park. This Incredible Edible Park was a plan started by the Windwood Garden Homes, or townhouses that are right near the bike trail where all these crops were planted.
The positive part was they built a sign, which is no longer there, and built a bench structure with a roof that is still there. There were several crops, which seemed to be maintained fairly well during certain seasons, it looked fine. Other storage for equipment were around the area, one of those plastic toilet stalls, but the place was an eyesore.
I won’t debate the labor behind it, the city cuts costs all the time, but I will say that most of the people who planted everything refused to let anyone go near the crops. This is along a bike trail where plenty of people have daily routines, no fences to guard anything but they made everyone feel like they were trespassing if you walked off the bike trail. Then the best part of it all, by the end of the day you would see the workers loading up their vehicles with several crops before leaving.
The funny part about this is the funding was only intended to utilize the land, all this talk about feeding the hungry, poor or homeless would simply be a bonus. I’ve seen schools plan trips to this place because it was open to the public, and it’s also a great way to teach children how easy it is to grow your own plants and food. I mention that it was open to the public because it’s been gone for a few years.
This wasn’t removed because of the drought, in fact all the sprinklers around Irvine are all timed the same as they’ve always been, they just use reclaimed water now. The week they decided to remove the sign was also when the rest of the vegetation was removed. If you walk along the trail you can also see the tire marks from their actual trucks where the workers made sure to kill off all the crops and now it’s just a bunch of weeds growing there.
It was an attempt to grow crops along that trail, possibly to encourage other communities to do the same and have all sorts of edible vegetation growing throughout the city. This only proves that these projects will never stand a chance if the city isn’t making money, if they had someone monitoring the workers and scheduling events welcoming the public it would have made more sense. They only needed to outsource workers until the fields were properly prepared, the rest should have been a community project, maybe even teach children from the nearby schools how to maintain various different crops.
People also failed to notice what was growing there, which were specifically a ton of items you may notice on the menu of food trucks. This was almost as if certain people made the decision of what would be growing there. Regardless, the idea was good, but poorly executed.

So awesome to have a place like this in the middle of Irvine. So happy I did my part and picked some peppers for the hungry. I recommend that everyone donate their time to pick the beautiful vegetables they grow for the hungry.