Sean C. Morgan
The city of Sweet Home has granted the use of Strawberry Park to Bob Duce and a group of volunteers for a community garden.
Duce started looking for piece of land to use as a community garden last year.
“Nothing ever materialized,” Duce said, and then he said something to Alice Grovom, a longtime leader in the city’s beautification effort. She connected him to Gail McCammon and Beth Liegel, and they went to work getting the garden going.
Their mission is “to provide gardening space to homeowners or apartment dwellers who do not have access to gardening facilities,” Duce said.
Grovom and Gary Fessler are serving in a sort of consultant role, Duce said. “It kind of took Alice to put it all together, to get some volunteers. Our main thing is we want to get more people involved.”
“If anyone has experience with a community garden, that would be absolutely lovely,” McCammon said.
The group is developing guidelines based on examples from other communities, he said. They will involve a fee of some kind, but the group doesn’t know what expenses it may have yet, such as insurance and water.
The garden will be divided into plots, which will be tended and harvested by individuals participating in the garden, Duce said. Members also will share garden-wide work.
“It’s an exploding concept,” McCammon said. “There used to be few community gardens.”
But it’s getting popular in communities all over the place, she said, adding that most people don’t have the soil quality they need to grow a garden.
The community garden will have the necessary soil, Duce said, although the group may need to haul it in.
The city offered the group two choices, Clover Park, located off Highway 20, and Strawberry Park, located at the north end of Westwood Lane.
“We’ve been working with them,” said Community Development Director Carol Lewis. “We’re still working out a few details.”
Among those are insurance and water, she said. The park has a sprinkler system, but it is never used. The park is wet, and the grass stays green throughout most of the year.
Clover was more exposed, and the garden would impact the aesthetics of the park, Duce said, so the group and city settled on Strawberry.
The garden will be located on the south side of the park, in a central area or closer to the east edge.
“We want to maintain some distance from the houses,” Lewis said. “It seemed like a logical, good use for a piece of grass that gets little use.”
The park has two pieces of playground equipment along with benches and tables, she said, but park use there is relatively low. The park is not as visible to passers-by as others in the city.
“As we try to increase use in that park, it seemed a logical way,” she said. Parents can tend their gardens while their children play.
“Over the years, we’ve had (community gardens) come up a number of times,” Lewis said, and the city has looked at Northside Park, but that park is well-used and busy.
Neither McCammon nor Duce have participated in a community garden before, but McCammon has been involved in the Garden Club for 20 years. Duce operates a lawn service in Sweet Home, and he dabbled in gardening while living in Brownsville. Liegel has had experience with a community garden in Corvallis.
Contact Duce at (541) 401-0655 or McCammon at (541) 367-8987 for more information, to join the community garden or to donate. Needed donations may include fencing and soil.