Simple Gifts Community Garden began in 2009 on land owned by Jeanne Hack at the corner of Hughes Street and Apex Peakway in Apex, NC.  Thanks to many volunteers, help from local businesses and a lot of trial and error, we built a 100’ x 100’ garden in the first two years. Over the next decade we doubled the size of the garden and added many new features. The youth of Apex United Methodist Church built a wonderful garden shed during Apex Outreach Service Project week. In more recent years, the shed was repainted and decorated by a local artist, Heidi Miller, of Durham. We added multiple pollinator gardens, a cutting garden, perennial gardens for asparagus and berries as well as fig bushes, apple trees and bee hives.

From the beginning our garden has been open to everyone in the community. Though we are sponsored by Apex UMC, we are intentionally inclusive of people of all faiths, ages and abilities. Part of our mission is to reinforce our belief that the things that we all have in common are more important than the things that divide us. Working at the garden is self-rewarding!

Over the years, an army of volunteers built the garden with a collective spirit and energy.  Garden members shared the bounty of the garden.  Through a communal approach, we worked the soil, battled the weeds, planted, harvested, and shared in the bounty and beauty of the garden. We made friends and shared many celebrations. We lost members of our garden family and wept together. We tested the boundaries of strength and perseverance.  For 13 years, we contributed to 5 different food banks, brought flowers to shut-ins, care facilities and schools. We had tomato sandwich nights and watermelon seed spittin’ contests.

On Easter Sunday of 2020, Miss Jeanne passed away. For the next 18 months we continued to garden at our first location. At the end of 2021, we dug up all the perennial plants we could manage and moved the plants, shed, tools and equipment into storage while we looked for another location to accommodate the Hack family’s desire to sell some of their land. A small, but dedicated group of volunteers spent almost two years meeting weekly looking for a new location. Thankfully we were able to finalize an agreement with the YMCA of the Triangle to use their vacant land at the dead end of Tingen Road to build Simple Gifts Community Garden 2.0. We began breaking ground and building fences in March of 2023. We have made a lot of progress with infrastructure to date. Our deer fence encloses a 200’ x 100’ garden. The shed has been relocated to a new foundation and beds have been built on half of the garden all in the first 9 months! We have been able to donate over 1000 pounds of fresh, organic produce in our first year.

Our goal now is to continue to build out the garden, to rebuild many of the features from the first garden along with some new ones and to spread the word about what we do and how people can help. We hope you’ll join us to help make the world a better place.

“One of the most delightful things about a
garden is the anticipation it provides.”

-W.E. Johns