Family Harvesting Vegetables Thanks To Volunteer Project

If it’s early August, it must be zucchini season.

Tamara Sorokin and her family have had plenty of the squash, and a lot of other vegetables, too.

Sorokin and her family are reaping the rewards of a volunteer project last spring that brought a vegetable garden to their home.

The Spokane Community Gardens group installed three raised beds for Sorokin and her six children, who live near Grant Park in one of the city’s low-income neighborhoods.

More than 100 families in Spokane have benefited from the project in the past three years. About 60 gardens were installed just this spring.

Sorokin said she’s saving at least $30 a month on her grocery bills, and her children are having fun pulling tender carrots and picking peas from the garden.

She said she told her kids they could each have one carrot a day, and now all the carrots are gone.

“They’d eat them right fresh,” Sorokin said.

Corn has sent up tassles and the ears are starting to swell with kernels.

A row of sunflower plants, placed along the fence outside of the raised beds, is about to go into bloom. Sorokin said she will dry the seeds and let the children eat them this fall.

The zucchini plants took over one of the raised beds, all but snuffing out the melon plants that were seeded next to them.

Each raised bed is four feet by eight feet, so the vegetable plants tend to get crowded.

But Sorokin said she’s been able to harvest beans, lettuce and broccoli, some of the more nutritious vegetables her family needs to eat.

“The lettuce was good. It was tender,” Sorokin said.

She has kept the garden watered and fertilized so the plants look healthy and green.

Community gardens volunteer Caydl Eggers has kept an eye on the plot to make sure it produces, and Eggers offers expertise so Sorokin can get the most from her vegetable patch.

, DataTimes