GLASGOW – The G Town SouL Swales community garden operates based on the motto painted on its sign: “Plant a seed. Pull a weed. Take what you need. Eat for free.”

The garden, which is located behind the Liberty District Ralph Bunche Center on Bunche Avenue, is a project that cultivates community involvement and allows people to take home produce they need.

Nicole Breazeale, an associate professor of sociology at the Western Kentucky University Glasgow Regional Center who spearheaded a similar garden project at the Barren County Detention Center, said people who eat at the soup kitchen in the Bunche Center are encouraged to help with maintaining the garden.

“The idea is to provide access to free fresh food to those who cannot afford it and start a conversation in Barren County about the need for fresh food,” she said.

At gardening events that are held every other week, people who eat at the soup kitchen and other interested community volunteers help with weeding and planting crops, Breazeale said.

“The people who need the food can take care of it and take home what they need,” she said.

So far, two EnviroHealth Link grants from the Barren River District Health Department that were received in 2016 and 2017 have funded the garden, she said. Diane Sprowl, the department’s community health improvement branch manager, said the grants were for $14,291 and $15,000.

The garden is not built on a traditional plot farming system, instead taking the form of five swales – lengthy rows where the soil was dug up and reshaped into mounds with mulch-filled trenches on each side.

Josh Johnson, a Cave City farmer and market manager of the Bounty of the Barrens farmers market, said the swales cut down on how often the garden needs to be watered.

“Since this is on a bit of a hillside, rain would essentially wash the fertility and the topsoil down the hill when it rains,” he said.

The system captures rainwater as it moves down the slope and holds it in the soil and mulch.

“Water falls on the hillside, flows downhill and then gets captured in these ditches and sinks into the ground,” he said. “It just makes the system more resilient and helps it survive through periods of no rain.”

Recently, Johnson and other collaborators have been improving the quality of the soil by adding donated manure, mulch and hay to the swales, he said.

“The fertility should be improving for years to come because of this approach that we’re taking, trying to build the soil up over time,” he said.

A wealth of diverse crops, including potatoes, peppers, spinach, carrots and blackberries, have been grown in the garden, often with several different plants growing within the same few square feet of soil, Johnson said.

“On a big scale, when you have a lot of the same plants together, you can deplete those nutrients,” he said. “They target the same nutrients in the soil.”

Having a range of different crops growing together, if they’re compatible with one another, also produces a strong network of roots that helps keep water in and makes the mounds structurally tougher, Johnson said.

LaToya Drake, who Breazeale and Johnson credited with envisioning the project, said she wanted to help expand access to fresh food for people who otherwise might not have any.

“I thought that this would be good, to offer food to people in the community as well as provide some stuff for the soup kitchen eventually,” she said.

The project began about two years ago after the Bunche Center’s board of directors consented to the garden being started on the center’s property, Drake said.

While the garden serves as a source of fresh food for those who need it, Drake, who’s in the process of earning a master’s degree in integrative and functional nutrition from Stony Brook University, has also been using the garden to teach children in the Bunche Center’s day care program about healthy eating, she said.

People have frequently come by the garden to take food home, Drake said.

“We’ve caught people out here picking, but that’s what we want people to do,” she said.

The garden has also proven popular among local deer, who have frequently come by to eat the produce growing within, Drake said.

A fence made of fishing wire surrounds the garden, though several points where the lines have been breached illustrate that the fence no longer holds the deer at bay.

“The premise is (they) walk up on it and it scares the mess out of them … but I guess they just learned that they can break it,” Drake said of the fence.

Drake, Johnson and Breazeale have been trying to find a more effective method of keeping deer away but still aren’t sure how, she said.

Alma Glover, the Bunche Center’s director, said she approved of the garden as soon as she heard about the idea, citing a local need for fresh food.

“There are a lot of people in the community that don’t have food,” she said.

The Bunche Center hasn’t been involved with maintaining the garden, though Glover said plenty of people who eat at the soup kitchen have helped out with it as well.

Glover said she was in favor of the garden from the start because it would help provide food for the soup kitchen and for local people to take home.

“This is a great idea because it helps both ways,” she said.

– Follow Daily News reporter Jackson French on Twitter @Jackson_French or visit bgdailynews.com.