Editor’s note: This is the latest in a series of articles published during the past two years on community gardens in Fairhope. Additional reporting will occur in editions of next week’s newspaper and throughout 2011.

FAIRHOPE, Ala. - During a blustery winter afternoon this week, which followed two straight days of subfreezing temperatures, Frances Planner was working in her garden plot at the Homestead Village Community Garden.

As the wind whipped across the 19 other raised garden plots that bloomed with broccoli, pansies and a variety of other vegetables and flowers, she bent down close to the ground to inspect the cabbage in her own garden, which was growing well despite the hard freezes earlier in the week.

Nodding her head with apparent satisfaction, though noting she actually had too much cabbage, she walked to the other end of her plot, bending over again to carefully wind a garden hose in a tight circle, like many that run water to each of the plots.

Then she pointed to the garden next to hers, even more overflowing with leafy green vegetables.

“This one is so beautiful,” she said, smiling. “I was so jealous of her this fall and of her kale with all its colors.”

Planner, who turned 95 in November, is one of more than 50 people who have been tending vegetables since they were planted this fall in the city’s first community garden.

The roots of the story behind what it took to build a community garden in Fairhope this year and its related but smaller youth garden across town at the Fairhope Rotary Youth Club, run deep through several nonprofit and civic organizations and dozens of volunteers over the past two years.

“It has produced vegetables like you wouldn’t believe,” Rev. Terrance L. Jackson of New Era Missionary Baptist Church said of the youth garden where a dozen 5th-grade students graduated from a summer program, which certified them as the first local group of Junior Master Gardeners.

Those students have been helping to select next summer’s class of young gardeners and will serve as mentors for them.

“The garden has had an amazing impact on the community,” Jackson said. “Some of the kids come by and look at all the other kids having fun and then before long, they want to participate. Parents are talking about it. Kids are talking about. The word has gone out into the community. It’s an awesome thing.”

Planner also agrees that the community garden she’s been a part of the past few months does more than just produce locally grown produce.

“It’s very social,” Planner said. “We compare notes and exchange vegetables. It’s good exercise and it’s fun. It gets you out in the open. I think it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a learning experience for all of us.”