Local organization aims to connect with gardening, life skills classes

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Kelle Sunter has always loved gardening. When she lived in San Francisco, she made a garden out of the parking space that was behind her apartment building. She was ecstatic to have her own yard after moving to Blaine in 1988.

“Like every new gardener who gets a yard for the first time, you start buying everything and sticking it in and then things die and get out of control,” Sunter said with a laugh.

She realized a lot of people, not having a knowledge base for gardening, have no way to begin to learn. She sought to bridge that gap with free informational classes and resources for the community in the form of her organization Community Orchards for Resources and Education (CORE).

CORE’s mission is “to provide city-wide enhancement and beautification on a multitude of levels by planting food-bearing trees, bushes and vines that offer food to residents of Blaine; local wildlife food and shelter; soil enhancement; and water retention.” By partnering with the Blaine library, CORE offers several free classes on a range of topics covering gardening and life skills.

“The Blaine library has been working with CORE for many years,” branch manager Debby Farmer said. “They are one of our best partners in bringing quality programming. Kelle is an excellent teacher and she brings in other great teachers and resources. What she offers, the community really wants and is hungry for that type of information.”

Farmer finds it extremely thoughtful of Sunter to offer classes during both weekdays and weekends to accommodate everyone’s schedules.

With the help of eight other instructors, Sunter schedules classes regularly at the Blaine library. CORE usually hosts two different classes each month, taking a break during the summer.

“We’re like a garden club on steroids,” Sunter said. “We’ll take anybody who wants to teach a class and encourage them and promote them. We have a mailing list now of over 400 people. Last year we did 40 classes at the Blaine library.”

Besides gardening, some of the life skills classes CORE has offered include knife-sharpening, buying hearing aids and the upcoming workshop about how to get a house ready to be sold. Some of Sunter’s co-instructors include a retired high school horticultural teacher and a dahlia farmer.

Classes on harvesting mason bees and brewing kombucha, both taught by Sunter, have been some of the most popular classes in the community and have required multiple sessions to keep up with the demand. Other popular classes, such as pruning fruit trees, need to be held at a certain time of year to be relevant.

The most recent CORE classes sought to address what to do with the end-of-year harvest, in the form of fermenting vegetables to make sauerkraut and other delectable combinations.

Standing before a class of nine interested pupils at the Blaine library on September 11, Sunter showed participants how to grind cabbage and mash it together with salt and other ingredients in a large bucket to make sauerkraut.

“Raw sauerkraut is really good for your small intestine, it makes your guts really happy because it creates an environment for the good bacteria to live that help you digest your food,” Sunter said. “If you can make sauerkraut, you can ferment anything. It’s all the same process, just different ingredients in the jar.”

Besides making sauerkraut, Sunter recommends fermenting carrots with ginger, beets with horseradish and green beans with garlic. Once vegetables are chopped into smaller pieces and combined with a brine solution and additional seasonings, it takes one to two weeks for them to ferment.

She suggests people use a quart or half-gallon jar when fermenting vegetables. A little goes a long way, and the result can be served as a side dish or a topping for salads or hot food.

“It’s my passion, and my mental health,” Sunter said about CORE.

CORE will be offering a knife-sharpening class on Wednesday, November 6, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. and on Saturday, November 9, from 10:30 a.m. to noon. The kombucha class will be hosted on Wednesday, November 13 from 4 to 6 p.m. and on Saturday, November 16 from 10 a.m. to noon. All sessions will be held at the Blaine library at 610 3rd Street.

For more information, or if you are interested in teaching a class, call 360/332-7435 or email fruit@blaine-core.com.

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