The community center currently has a community garden in the back of their building and is used to grow crops by staff. The director of the community center, Amano Dube, has the vision of turning the space into an educational space as well as a garden representing the Eastern African culture. They ultimately would like to convert all their existing farm boxes into keyhole gardens. The keyhole garden is an unique Eastern African farming style, superficially similar to a farming box. However, it contains a compost bucket in the middle. The decomposition in the bucket will give the plant nutrition through the soil. This farming style is specifically used to enrich poor soil in East Africa, but is relevant elsewhere. Amano wants to teach young community members about their African heritage through keyhole gardening.

FBD was asked to design a keyhole garden to accommodate both the farming and teaching aspects of Amano Dube’s vision for the community garden. Therefore, our design differs subtle from general keyhole garden design. While most keyhole gardens hold the compost in the middle and extend the soil out in all directions, our design sacrifices some efficiency to expose the compost “key.” This redesign allows students of the design to observe the compost and the garden structure in real time and provides a better visual understanding of how the keyhole garden functions.