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Community garden growth

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Community garden growth

Students may have noticed a hoop-house along Hubbard Street while driving to and from NIC or maybe even little rows of vegetables if they were paying close attention.

All the endeavors come from the Kootenai Environmental Alliance (KEA) who started the Community Roots’ Gathering Garden not too long ago.

Two years ago, KEA received financial support from the North Idaho College Foundation and was donated lease of the land by the college for a garden.

“They [the college] have shown great support; the board, the administration, the staff, and the students.” says Adrienne Cronebaugh, executive director of KEA.

Cronebaugh says that one of KEA’s missions is to practice permaculture, a branch of ethics involving human harmony with the environment.

The garden, although still a work in progress, already has many state-of-the-art systems in place to display permaculture.

Large solar panels stand near the shed and are used to heat the hoop-house in the wintertime. The growing season in North Idaho is so short that being able to start early and keep your plants alive longer can really make a big difference.

The Culinary Arts Program of NIC and Emery’s Restaurant were big supporters of the Gathering Garden and helped KEA get funding from the NIC foundation, which helped pay for the solar panels.

Another system the Gathering Garden has in place is a storm drain. Water floods from three acres into the garden every year. The North Idaho College Environmental Science Department helped install the storm drain along with volunteers to design a bio filtration plan. Water comes in and drains into the ground where it is filtered an reused to water the garden.

“One of our goals is improved water quality and so these are ways that we can begin putting in storm water swales instead of water drains that drain directly into the lake and river,”says Cronebaugh

Older students might know what the area looked like before the garden. At first, being old mill property and a vacant lot, it looked like an impossible place for growing food. The area was full of buried tarps and compressed soil – a place where only weeds can thrive.

Even after building a hoop-house and few raised beds, it’s credit to volunteers that a weedy area has become a flourishing garden in just two years.

“It’s been a major transformation,” says Cronebaugh.

A garden of this size, however, requires a lot of up-keep, therefore putting Gathering Gardens constantly depending on volunteers and donations year-round.

“We utilize whatever we can get our hands on,” says Cronebaugh,“It really has a very, very limited budget-next to nothing-and these volunteers make it happen with that.”

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Sally Balcaen is on the staff of the Sentinel and covers news stories.

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