June 26, 2017
Grinnell ended 2016 with four giving gardens, and the 2017 gardening season has seen the addition of three more gardens, including one in Ahrens Park, as well as an increase in the people watching over those gardens. Imagine Grinnell will host a bike tour of giving gardens on Saturday, July 8.
Giving gardens are planted with the intention that anyone in the community can help to tend any of the gardens and can take any of the produce of the gardens. Produce not taken from the gardens will be harvested and given to the Mid-Iowa Community Action food bank and other locations where people who may be food-insecure can benefit from the food.
Everyone is invited to take a bike tour of all Grinnell’s giving gardens on the morning of Saturday, July 8. The tour will begin at 9 a.m. at the GRMC garden just south of the Light Center and just east of the main GRMC campus. Imagine Grinnell which helps organize volunteers for the giving gardens hosted a bike tour in 2016 which Executive Director Rich Dana said was well-attended, so the organization decided to host a ride again in 2017.
Chad Nath is the health and wellness coordinator at Grinnell Regional Medical Center (GRMC) and a devoted gardener himself. In the past several years he helped with the establishment of four giving gardens and, as the 2017 spring planting season approached, tilled the existing giving gardens at GRMC, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Summer St. Park and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church to ready them for another season.
He also tilled land for a new garden next to the Grinnell Community Daycare and Preschool in Ahrens Park.
Nath explains that Theisen’s made a grant to the 2017 giving gardens of $2,500 with which seeds, starts, tools, rain barrels and signage were purchased during the growing season.
The GRMC garden is being maintained again by volunteer GRMC employees and by children in the annual GRMC summer day camp which has been expanded this year.
Four employers are partnering to make summer day camp available to children of parents who work at any of the employers, GRMC, Grinnell College, Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance Company and the Grinnell-Newburg school district. The day camp has 120 kids signed up and is averaging around 70 children a day. Families decide which days their kids will attend camp and pay a daily fee of $20.
The four employers are supporting the day camp by providing staff and helping fund field trips which include visits to Living History Farms, the Science Center and the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines; the Iowa Speedway in Newton; and the Children’s Museum in Iowa City.
The program is based at Davis School where free summer lunch is being served to kids age 18 and under. Davis is also housing the Summer Learning Is Cool for Kids program with its 39 AmeriCorps members and 95 kids.
Among the day camp’s weekly activities are Tuesday visits to the GRMC giving garden where the kids weed and tend the garden and pick produce ready to eat. Nath says smaller vegetables like radishes and onions are starting to be ready, noting the garden will produce more heavily as the summer progresses and the larger plants like tomatoes and squashes have time to grow and ripen.
When the kids finish in the garden each Tuesday, they ride their bus to the MICA location where the week’s produce is donated to the food bank. In past years the total donation during the growing season has been 600 to 700 pounds of produce.
Volunteers from the congregations at St. John’s and St. Paul’s tend those gardens, and the 39 AmeriCorps members working with the Summer Learning Is Cool for Kids program are taking care of the Summer St. Park garden.
The newest garden in the giving garden family is in Ahrens Park, being tended by youngsters from the Grinnell Community Daycare and Preschool and their teachers.
Nath prepared the ground by tilling, and Jennison Willett, a local master gardener, planted the garden in mid-June with extra starts she had.
With vegetables growing in the Ahrens Park garden, the daycare and preschool kids are just now beginning regular visits to the garden to weed and watch for produce they can harvest and either eat or give to others.
Two other giving gardens have been planted this year for the first time, in a plot on Marvin Ave. and a plot next to Davis School.
Those interested in helping to tend giving gardens can simply go to a garden or can contact Imagine Grinnell’s Dana at (641)-236-5518 or imaginegrinnell@iowatelecom.net. Also a devoted gardener, Dana helps to coordinate work in the gardens.
Dana also manages the garden plots at Miller Park, which are not giving gardens but plots rented by families who wish to rent garden space. Dana says all the plots are rented and planted and that the produce there belongs to the families who tend the plots. He and volunteers are spreading wood chips to make walking paths among the plots.
