In the Spotlight: Community Garden Updates

The general message we’ve been hearing from gardeners around town and around the region is that it’s been slow growing this year. That’s certainly been the case with my own little vegetable patch at home. My first seeding of carrots never did anything at all, and the second – once I gave up on the

By Joel Hanson
Sitka Community Gardens

The general message we’ve been hearing from gardeners around town and around the region is that it’s been slow growing this year. That’s certainly been the case with my own little vegetable patch at home. My first seeding of carrots never did anything at all, and the second – once I gave up on the first – took weeks to show signs of life.

But my back yard doesn’t have good southern exposure, so expectations aren’t great. That’s why I’ve been working with a small group of gardeners to revitalize an organization that has been more-or-less dormant for the past seven years, Sitka Community Gardens.

SCG is proposing to develop a new garden site located close to town, offering lots of open space and good sun – relatively good sun, anyway, for Sitka! Unfortunately, like my carrots, this project has been slow growing. But it’s showing signs of life at last.

In order to lease appropriately zoned land from the City and Borough of Sitka for a garden project, a prescribed process needs to be followed. In the early stages, this involves the city issuing a Request for Proposals (RFP) which encourages anyone interested in pursuing a horticultural development to offer up their particular concept outline and plan of operations.

The city has recently issued an RFP for a “Jarvis Street Horticultural Site.” And Sitka Community Gardens, a joint project of Sitka Local Foods Network and Transition Sitka, is preparing to submit our plans for a future Jarvis Street Community Garden. Our idea is to create as many standard-sized 10’ by 20’ garden plots as possible on a half-acre parcel, and to lease these plots to gardeners at an affordable rate, around $40-$50/yr.

We hope to offer at least a couple of plots at no charge to worthy non-profit organizations like the Sitka Homeless Coalition. But most – more than forty – will be leased to individuals or families.

The garden’s management and operations will be organized around a cooperative association model where gardeners themselves are responsible for everything from annual plot assignments to site maintenance. Sitka Community Gardens can’t take credit for inventing this model; community gardeners in Juneau developed it more than twenty years ago and have been using it successfully in their garden operations since then.

Ultimately, it will be up to the Sitka Assembly to decide whether our proposal is acceptable. Working in our favor is the fact that diverse community members have been expressing their support for this project for over a year, and the fact that 30% of our plot capacity is already spoken for.

We’ll have info and plot sign-up sheets available at the Transition Sitka table at all remaining Saturday Sitka Farmers Markets this summer – August 10th and 24th, and September 7th and 21st. Please stop by and visit. We’d love your questions and comments.

Sitkans generally interested in food security and community resilience are encouraged to contact Sitka Local Foods Network or Transition Sitka through links on the organization’s websites.