ROSES to the Carrboro Community Garden Coalition and town staff for putting a little patch of available public land into something productive, in more ways than one.

Members of the coalition -- a grassroots group of local gardeners -- had been hoping to find a site somewhere in Carrboro to begin a community garden. They asked the town about available sites, and town staff suggested a portion of a 10-acre tract off Hillsborough Road that the town purchased several years ago as a future park site. Carrboro plans to develop the Martin Luther King Jr. Park site with playgrounds, nature trails and other amenities, but none of that is likely to happen until at least 2010.

So, with approval from the Board of Aldermen, the coalition has broken ground on a community garden, tilled and fenced the plot and will grow tomatoes, squash, beans, peppers, melons and other vegetables. The produce will be divvied up, with some going to needy folks in the community.

Talk about a win-win. The town's property is put to good use. The people doing the gardening will enjoy the many benefits -- physical, emotional and spiritual -- of working with the earth to grow good plants. Obviously, some folks will benefit by eating the healthy food that comes from that effort. Even those who aren't directly involved may think a bit more about the virtures of small-scale, truly locally produced food.

Good work on the town's part, too, to be so receptive and so willing to work with residents to make a good idea happen.


ROSES and RASPBERRIES to the Chatham County commissioners, for doing the right thing but going about it in a needlessly opaque way.

The commissioners on Monday imposed a moratorium on most residential development in the county. That was a good move, because the previous board had green-lighted every proposal that came its way, approving some 15,000 new homes in the past few years in an explosion of growth that threatens to outstrip the available schools, utilities and other services necessary to sustain it.

The county needs a temporary halt to the building boom so those services can catch up. The voters said as much in November when they replaced the growth-happy commissioners with three new board members who came bearing slow-growth agendas.

Pro-development groups, not surprisingly, opposed the moratorium. Sorry, but they have no one to blame but their friends on the former board, whose open-door policy for developers made the building halt necessary.

The moratorium opponents do have a valid point, however, in complaining that the commissioners failed to make draft copies of the moratorium ordinance available before the vote. They say they asked several times for copies of the draft ordinance but weren't given one until after the board voted.

Even worse, county officials apparently did give an early copy to Jeffrey Starkweather, chairman of the Chatham Coalition -- the group that helped propel the slow-growth candidates to office.

In other words, it appears that county officials showed a draft ordinance to a political supporter but refused to show it to political opponents.

If that is in fact what happened, it's way out of bounds -- especially for a board that vowed, in addition to slowing growth, to conduct more open government than the previous board.

"It is not open government to hold a hearing on an unpublished ordinance and to vote on an ordinance that no one has seen," said one moratorium opponent.

While we disagree with him on the moratorium, we couldn't agree more on that point of public process.