Community Garden gearing up for third year

By Patti LeClaire

Food Sustainability Administrative Assistant

Good morning, Garden peeps and Happy New Year! 2016 will be our third year with the Grand Ronde Tribal Community Garden.

The garden has made a lot of progress since 2013, when the garden was totally eradicated of weeds and we rebuilt the beds, repaired the water lines, re-laid cardboard and topped it with cedar chips. This preparation needed to be completed before planting of numerous vegetables in 2014.

Other projects finished in 2014 included the greenhouse being close to completion. In 2015, we started all the garden vegetables from seed in the greenhouse, built the pole barn and a water line was placed at the greenhouse and the pole barn.

And we can’t forget about our chickens. They were a day old when we got them and they now will soon be a year old. We built the chicken coop (aka Chicken Taj Mahal) and extended the chicken run into the garden.

They have done an awesome job. The chickens started laying eggs in the middle of July. Total amount of eggs in 2015 was 3,271 eggs. The total harvest in the garden for 2014 and 2015 was 5,003 pounds, which was distributed between the Food Bank, preschool, foster care and our volunteers.

This year we have many educational series that will be coming, such as learning the importance of amending soil for gardening and advanced composting and its benefits. Dates will be posted on the Tribal Community Garden Facebook page soon,

We are starting a list of individuals interested in volunteering at the garden this year. For the garden to be successful, we need at least 10 to 20 volunteers. The last three years we have had four dedicated people who still volunteer. We had numerous garden days where we had a pretty good turnout each time. Yet we need to ramp up our volunteers so we can do a weekly schedule. With more volunteers we could accomplish so much more.

A huge thank you and appreciation goes out to Scott LeClaire, Rob Wiggs and Mike Wiggs for being so dedicated and helping the garden become successful. We wouldn’t be this far without the three of you!

Kristy Deloe and Patti LeClaire would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the garden!