Northeast area to receive community garden grant

The Spokane Regional Health District has received a grant to promote community gardens and farmers’ markets in northeast Spokane in the area of City Council District 1.

The program, which is in the planning and research stages, would help promote good nutrition and physical activity, as well as help people get to know their neighbors and others in the community.

The projects that will benefit from the grant will include improving the community to make it easier to walk around the neighborhoods and to schools, building a special play area for disabled children at Mission Park, and creating community gardens.

The grant, a Healthy Communities grant from the Washington State Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, is for $50,000 for the first year of the program. If the health district can show that the project is moving forward successfully, they will receive an additional $50,000 a year for the following four years.

In order to plan the gardens, the health district wants input from the members of the community to decide what they need from a garden. Monday night, they gathered a focus group to discuss just that.

Heleen Dewey, a public health educator at the health district, led the group in a series of questions about gardening.

“I love to grow things,” one member of the group said.

“It’s just so relaxing, being in the garden,” another said.

Some of the issues the group talked about included making sure the garden beds were raised so those with physical limitations or in wheelchairs could reach them.

They talked about how much they would be willing to pay to rent a plot of land for a season, mostly to offset the cost of water.

Security was an issue for the group. They worried about vandals and were concerned that animals might get into their gardens and eatthe fruits of their labor.

The focus group included senior citizens who like to walk to get where they are going, so the location of the gardens was important, as well as what tools they would need to bring with them.

But mostly the group wanted to get an education about what makes things grow and what would best grow in their plots. They discussed the benefits of organic gardening versus conventional gardening.

One focus group member expressed his excitement for gardening.

“It gets people together to grow flowers and vegetables,” he said.

This first year of the project will include planning and research, and hopefully at the end of five years there will be community gardens in neighborhoods throughout northeast Spokane.