Naju-si Holds Opening Ceremony for Bitgaram Park Community Garden

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Kim Yukbong] Naju City, Jeollanam-do (Mayor Kang In-gyu) announced on the 21st that it recently held an opening ceremony for the Bitgaram Park Community Garden established in the Innovation City area.

The opening ceremony held at the 1st garden was conducted simply by allocating time and personnel for each of the three gardens to comply with COVID-19 social distancing guidelines.

Prior to the ceremony, the city conducted disinfection and sterilization of the main garden entrances, roadside areas, and agricultural tool storage sheds, while enforcing mandatory mask-wearing and providing hand sanitizers on the day to thoroughly prevent COVID-19.

For the smooth gardening of novice farmers, the originally planned crop cultivation education was replaced with a garden guidebook and cultivation leaflets.

The city supplied vegetable seedlings (Dangjo chili pepper, cucumber chili pepper, cherry tomato, lettuce), hoes, and seedling shovels to the garden tenants.

This year, Bitgaram Park Community Garden consists of ▲1st garden (Bitgaram-dong 536) with 197 plots ▲2nd garden (Bitgaram-dong 831) with 50 plots ▲4th garden (Bitgaram-dong 22-1) with 61 plots, totaling 308 plots, of which 276 plots have been leased.

The remaining 32 plots (1st garden) will be operated as a smart farm test research garden in collaboration with KEPCO KDN.

Ten urban agriculture-type smart farm plots will have separate education conducted online early next month.

The 3rd garden (Bitgaram-dong 864) will be used as a ‘Public Experience Garden’ where citizens and children who missed leasing can cultivate various crops together.

Based on soil analysis results before opening, the city established a high-quality soil environment suitable for crop growth by improving the soil using eco-friendly agricultural materials.

Additionally, to minimize soil pollution, eco-friendly paper mulching that naturally decomposes in the soil was introduced instead of plastic mulching, attracting attention.

The garden operating organization, Four Leaf Clover Agricultural Cooperative Corporation, plans to minimize face-to-face interactions on site until the end of COVID-19 and focus on online communication with garden farmers through SNS (Naver Band).

A city official said, “We thank the garden farmers who actively cooperated in observing social distancing at this opening ceremony. We will do our best to operate the garden so that it can be actively used as a healthy leisure and communication space for citizens through various programs such as beginner farmer classes and children’s harvesting experiences held from May to September.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.