Many hands in the dirt make moving a community garden light work.
That isn’t exactly how the saying goes, but at the Sept. 20 grand opening of the Hope Community Garden, it was evident it takes a village to move a garden across town. Sponsors and volunteers were thanked, as Coquihalla Elementary students, community members and business leaders crowded around the garden’s greenhouse.
The space is truly collaborative. From high school students building the wooden sign at the entrance to the garden, to Emil Anderson Construction supplying elementary school kid-sized wheelbarrows, each piece of the garden has been put together or contributed by a part of the Hope community.
The location, behind the Coquihalla Elementary School, is a forever home for the garden. Built in part on Fraser Cascade School District land and in part on District of Hope land at Morrison Park, the garden is now able to grow more permanent roots.
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Garden director Esther Brysch toured the garden with The Hope Standard, pointing out the areas where Coquihalla Elementary School classes, community members, and Hope Garden Club members get their hands dirty.
Some unique plants growing in the garden including purple broccoli, a mammoth sunflower plant, physalis tomatoes and even some melons. The melons are so-called ‘plant volunteers’, seeds which came with the dirt or compost and sprouted on their own.
Brysch said the garden has space for community members to garden, both inside and outside, with plans to build 42 or more outside garden plots. Some of the indoor beds, inside the greenhouse, are raised for people who have a hard time bending down while gardening.
“Right now, we don’t have any empty ones but we will build more either this fall or later, next spring,” she said.
The move of the garden was an undertaking noticed by Communities in Bloom (CIB), an organization which challenges communities to enhance and beautify their communities through citizen engagement. CIB recently awarded Hope with the highest award for communities, five blooms, as well as a special mention for the effort to relocate the garden.
“The director of the community garden, Esther Brysch, is to be commended for her work in organizing the move and for her ongoing efforts, including maintenance and supervising work-bees. She helps make great use of land in and around the garden with fruit trees and shrubs,” the judges wrote.
In the special mention, the judges commended the donors and volunteers who helped move the garden and the efforts to involve elementary school children in gardening.
“A really good way of teaching food security and enjoyment of gardening,” the special mention read. “Gardening is certainlly child-friendly here with the “mud kitchen” stand and end of school year “salad celebration”.”
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“This is one of the best community gardens that I have seen in B.C.,” said community member Teresa Williams, who is also a judge with Communities in Bloom. “I have seen over a dozen different community gardens. I don’t recall anybody having such a large greenhouse and having such a fearless leader as Esther. And the fact that this particular community garden has a large number of school children involved and their teachers.”
Guy Burrell was present at the Sept. 20 opening to watch two trees planted in the garden in honour of his parents and avid gardeners, Faye and Bob Burrell. Elementary school students dug their hands in the dirt, helping the planting effort while discussing whether the trees they were planting were in fact ‘fake’ trees or ‘fig’ trees.
The trees were, in fact, figs. Faye, who passed away two years ago from lung cancer, and Bob who died six months later, were avid gardeners. The family transported their fig tree from Edmonton to B.C. when they made the move west, and had fig trees in their Hope yard.
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“They’d always been involved in garden clubs no matter where they were, before they started this one,” Burrell said. “They helped with the first community garden and I’m sure they would have been part of this one as well.”
Guy said the family had a big garden growing up, which fed the whole family. The pair also gardened together, as they did most things in life.
“They did everything together, they would never be doing anything apart from each other. Dad would probably be doing more of the physical labour and mom was the brains behind the operation.”
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