The Saline Reporter
A Heritage Newspaper
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Community garden to bloom
Saline School District donates 1-acre plot
By Brian Cox, Staff Writer
PUBLISHED: March 1, 2007
Photo by Hiroshi Onuma
Calesta Harrison leads discussion at a recent meeting of the Saline Community Garden planning committee. Harrison first thought of building a community garden last September. Plans call for Saline's first community garden to open in the spring on a plot of school land off Woodland Drive.
It is now a barren snow-covered field, but this spring the color palette of Saline's first community garden will transform a swath of landscape alongside the one-room Weber-Blaess Schoolhouse on Woodland Avenue.
The idea is to create a community growing together.
The garden is the brainchild of Calesta Harrison, who when her family recently moved to Ann Arbor Street from Lodi Township bemoaned the loss of gardening space.
Saline, she thought, should have a community garden. The next day, she received an e-mail about a class offered through Growing Hope on how to start a community garden.
It was fate.
"I thought, 'OK, I'm running with this,'" Harrison said.
And run with it she did.
The following week, she began handing out fliers to gauge interest. She met David Rhoads, who proved a key resource in bringing a wide range of community leaders and activists in on the project. The community group Pick Up the Pace, Saline, or PUPS, agreed to provide about $3,500 in funding, and momentum on the project accelerated.
Much of the early winter was spent scouting locations for the garden, and last month the Saline Area Schools agreed to commit about an acre of land on Woodland Drive.
"The schools are hugely supportive of the project," said Harrison, who overflows with ideas for how the garden can embody a community spirit.
Plans are in place to offer a range of gardening and cooking classes through Saline Parks and Recreation, Community Education and the 212 Arts Center.
The Saline Area Historical Society has provided the garden committee a list of historical Saline figures after which Harrison plans to name the individual beds.
"I asked myself what would make this garden unique to Saline," Harrison said, "and I thought of arts and culture and history, and I wanted to pull all that into the garden."
Turns out a community garden is as much about people as it is plants.
Work is set to begin on constructing the garden beds later this month and organizers have set May 20 as the tentative grand opening.
Much work remains to be done until then, though, and the garden planning committee continues to seek out volunteers to help with building and construction, moving soil, people with a tiller to help with tilling, people with a truck, people interested in teaching classes through the garden, those involved in the community with promoting healthy habits for living and arts/culture/history in a intergenerational setting and, of course, those with a love of gardening.
Gardeners must reside in the Saline Area School District to have a plot in the garden. Applications are available online at salinegarden.org. Plot registration begins April 1 on a first-come, first-serve basis.
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