Garden Will Help Grow Hope

Jeremy Street sleeps on the floor of a room no larger than a good-size prison cell.

His home in the Wilton Apartments doesn’t have much in the way of amenities. Tenants in the 50 apartment cubicles must share the bathrooms.

Street sees potential for a garden and courtyard in a weedy lot just outside the south wall of the four-story brick building at Pacific and Browne.

He is getting help.

Earlier this month, volunteers of the Spokane Community Gardens organization built two raised-bed garden boxes in the lot just outside the Wilton.

Each 4-by-8-foot box was fashioned to be about 3 feet high. They are filled with topsoil.

The taller style allows elderly or handicapped gardeners to tend vegetables with less bending.

Street said the vegetable boxes now occupy a place that was more of a home to nighttime beer drinking than to the contemplative pursuit of raising plants.

“There is no social place for the residents to congregate,” Street said. “Hopefully, people will want to participate.”

Last week, community garden volunteers Lori Steiner and Kay Stoltz returned to the Wilton with seeds, plant starts and advice on how to get the garden growing.

They gave Street a series of cardboard cutouts showing the proper spacing for lettuce, chard, spinach, beans and such. Already, several small donated garlic plants and a tiny Italian parsley start were taking root.

Steiner said the community gardens group hopes to provide the opportunity for personal accomplishment that comes with a successful gardening hobby, not to mention a potential abundance of nutritious produce.

“We like people to become self-sufficient once they are done with the training,” Steiner said.

Now in its fifth year, the nonprofit community gardens group will have installed 440 garden boxes for low-income people and the elderly throughout Spokane through this spring.

Street hopes the garden at the Wilton blossoms into something more than a vegetable bonanza.

Already, he has talked the managers into fencing the courtyard so is becomes the domain of tenants and not the street people who wander through the area.

He has received a proposal drawn up last year by landscape architecture students at Washington State University at Spokane for developing the courtyard. It calls for patio paving, ornamental plants, a barbecue, basketball hoop and trees.

The owners of the building, Spokane Housing Ventures, don’t have much money for those kinds of improvements, Street said.

Rents at the building are kept as low as possible so that homeless people can start rebuilding their lives with a roof over their heads.

“Everyone here is mending a broken wing,” Street said.

Now that the vegetable garden is in place, Street said he is hoping for grants or help from local churches to make the courtyard possible.

“I am hoping it will become a magnet for all kinds of social interaction,” he said.