Community garden thrives with new improvements

Blaine’s community garden has seen new improvements since the start of this summer. The garden now has the potential for 34 spaces. These include 18 flat plots and 16 raised boxed beds. Two of the raised beds are reserved for kids’ programs and one for the Blaine Food Bank.

Flat plots are 12 by 20 feet and raised beds are four by eight feet. Either can be rented by anyone in the community for $12 per year.

Garden manager Kelle Sunter led the new improvements, including creating more parking spaces with her tractor and building accessible plots. Four new raised beds are 21 inches tall, approximately the seat height of a wheelchair. A new eight-foot-wide gravel path provides a hard surface for people using wheelchairs and walkers to access the raised beds. Five more elevated beds are accessible along the new pathway for those with mobility challenges. They were finished at the end of June and are now available to rent.

“It’s pretty exciting to be involved in the community garden right now, because this is a good chapter for it,” Sunter said.

Started in 2002, Blaine’s community garden has gone through waves of activity. It provides opportunities for those who don’t have a yard to start a garden, such as renters.

“Lots of times landlords won’t let you dig up the front yard and put in a garden,” Sunter said. “This way, you can walk a block or two and be at a space that’s really yours.”

The community garden is built on city land, and the city supplies tools, water and compost in the spring. During the new improvements this summer, the city helped relocate the fire hydrants closer to the garden spaces.

“We can grow food year-round in a garden space with some protection and having the city being willing to support a community garden like they do is such a gift,” said Sunter.

Food security has always been a priority of Sunter’s. As the community garden manager, she works with kids from the Boys and Girls Club during the summer and Blaine elementary school’s Grow For It! program during the spring.

The Grow For It! program was created in 2017, following Let’s Move! Blaine, a similar program with the mission to provide educational opportunities and health resources to kids. Grow For It! is an eight-week class for kids in grades three through five focused on gardening.

“They’re not manufacturing food in the back of the grocery store,” Sunter said. “Our goal is to get people to understand that, especially kids. For me, part of this food security process is getting kids to understand that they can actually grow their own food.”

With the harvesting season wrapping up, there is still a surprising amount of activity happening in the community garden. Sunter said she has seen Swiss chard, kale, tomatoes, carrots, beets, green onions, yellow onions, garlic, beans, corn, cabbage, kohlrabi, broccoli, winter squash, pumpkins, peppers, celery and potatoes growing in the plots into October.

During this time of year, gardeners might be putting down cardboard or black plastic to protect their plots. Planting cover crops – such as chopped leaves or grass – can help protect the topsoil from sunlight during the winter.

“It really depends on the gardener,” Sunter said. “The big change is when we get a hard frost.”

To Sunter, initiating a demand for renting the plots in the garden creates a sense of need in the community.

“I would like to see people signing up for plots,” she said. “We need to create demand, and we need to help people learn how to do it. If you can go and grow enough fresh spinach and chard and carrots to feed your kids out of a little garden space, that’s a good thing.”

If you are interested in renting a plot for next year, contact Blaine city hall to submit a new gardener reservation form.