Community Gardens Are Coming to Bingen and White Salmon

On Saturday November 3, 2007 many Bingen – White Salmon Horizons community members attended a visioning session at the Pioneer Center. We used that day-long session to form Action Teams for the specific areas that the people at the Action Forum most wanted to see in their communities.

The Food and Garden Education Action Team was one of the favorite activities. The original team consisted of Jay Anderson, Bruce Bolme, Zoë Campbell, Timi Keene, and Debbie Olson. Since the visioning session, we’re delighted to have new members Brenda Spring, Clair Hook, and Lorena Lowell join the team.

This team decided that the best way to educate the community about food and gardening was to create a community garden project and have a variety of classes on local food production, nutrition, and preservation.

We developed criteria for a good garden site, and requested our communities to identify sites that would meet those criteria. The response was terrific, and we had 10 sites to look at and choose from.

Three sites had the desired location, access, water, and represented our communities very well. One is near Daubenspeck Park in Bingen. It has a storage shed, and is partially fenced. It has good pedestrian access for Bingen residents and can provide hands-on experience in food growing. About 12 garden plots, 4 ft x 20 ft, will be available.

Another is adjacent to Rhine Village, a low-income housing unit in White Salmon. Many residents are interested in gardening, and this will be their first opportunity to get their hands dirty and produce clean healthy food for themselves. This site is large enough for at least 16 4x20 plots.

The third site is on the grounds of Bambinos, a bilingual learning center for children. This location is already fenced, and includes a house for educational classes and a kitchen for learning and doing food preservation. The garage can be used for equipment storage. About 12 plots will be available here. It has good pedestrian access for many White Salmon residents, and the children at the center can have their own garden space. They will learn about food from seed to mouth, and have a better understanding of what gardening means for humans.

How to choose? Which site and which people get a community garden? In order to maximize opportunity for poverty reduction, for nutritional education, and gardening experience, we decided to S T R E T C H our capability and sponsor community gardens at all three sites. The Columbia High School agriculture department has offered to roto-till each parcel and to provide plant starts from their greenhouse.

The Team will be providing hand tools and an irrigation system at each site, plus a storage shed and deer fencing if needed, to the limit of our capability. We are asking the people and local businesses in our communities to S T R E T C H their capability as well and be generous with their time, their energy and enthusiasm, and tools and gardening equipment that they might be willing to share or donate. These community gardens are a team effort. With the active involvement of our communities we can have a win-win experience.

Gorge Grown Food Network [www.gorgegrown.com] and the Master Gardener program of WSU Extension have offered their excellent coaching and technical support. We also have the model of a successful community garden in Hood River sponsored by La Clinica to provide ideas and oohs and aahs.

All the plots will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, while taking care that land is available for children at each site.