Community garden shares humble roots, looks to grow membership

Tucked behind St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Ferndale is the Bigfork/Ferndale Community Garden. Its 80-plus plots are largely bare this time of year, but in a matter of weeks, will be teeming with new life as summer gardening gets underway. They’ve got an area reserved for blooms that attract pollinators, planters for raspberries, others for the food bank and a handful of elevated boxes for gardeners who can’t work on their knees. Each plot also comes with a set of hoops for members to hang protective cloths on in the even of an unexpected frost.

Gardeners can retire from the heat of the day under a shelter near the entrance and retrieve tools from a greenhouse toward the front of the space. The garden has well, grown, a great deal since its inception over 10 years ago and currently is on the lookout for new members.

Talk about starting a garden began in 2007 but the first seeds weren’t planted until 2009. Founding member Michelle Patterson said St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church was kind enough to donate the land, but without funding for a proper fence, they began the Bigfork/Ferndale Community Garden with a single plot and 100 square feet of potatoes.

“We had the room and we had the wherewithal and that’s how we started to do it,” she said.

The garden was a joint effort between church members, community volunteers and members of the grassroots effort, the Essential Stuff Project.

“Even though [the deer] ended up eating all the tops off the potatoes, I still knew where they were,” Patterson said, smiling. “We still find the odd potato which is really funny. They’re still cropping up every now and then.”

That first test plot was tended to by the Sunday school children and measured just four feet by four feet, in line with Mel Bartholomew’s “Square Foot Gardening.” The methodology is about growing a more efficient garden by planting in blocks instead of traditional rows.

“You can basically plant everything you need for one family in one four-by-four,” Patterson said, noting that the smaller plots are also a lot easier to weed and maintain.

While many hands helped to get the garden off the ground, there was one pair that was notably absent — that of Patterson’s husband, Jim. He was the more avid gardener of the two and they had hoped to begin the community garden project together. However, Patterson learned that her husband’s cancer returned one year after getting the all-clear from his doctor. And it came back with a vengeance — scans revealed that the cancer had metastasized to his lymph nodes and throughout his entire body.

“August 18 was when we found out from the scans that that’s what happened …. And he passed away on September 5,” she said. “I almost walked away [from the garden], but I just needed to keep on going. It was something we were looking forward to doing — and doing together.”

That first plot has since become a memorial plot for Jim Patterson and is seeded with flowers each year.

The rest of the garden continued to blossom and over the years, gardeners added infrastructure developments along with plots. An anonymous donor put up funds for the fence which were matched by the church and not long afterwards, drip lines were installed to lessen the burden of watering. The church also helped with big-ticket items like the greenhouse and shade area, Patterson said.

“Financially, the church has been our savior,” she noted.

Giving back to the local area has been a cornerstone of the garden since its inception. They used to plant spare plots for the Bigfork Food Bank, but now, each gardener is assigned a food bank plot to plant and care for when they reserve their own growing space to help share the workload. And for those who want to get involved but aren’t ready to take on the responsibility of their own plot just yet, the garden welcomes volunteers to help intermittently.

Gardener Regina Browne said working at the community garden is just plain fun.

“I can’t grow some of the things [at home] that I can grow here,” Browne said. “It’s just nice — it’s doing something for somebody, it’s talking with people … It’s fun being with people who like to do this.”

Patterson said she enjoys the inner peace that comes with working in the earth.

“It’s very healing. It grounds you as a person, I think, to grow things and see things live because you started them,” she said. “And there is nothing like a fresh tomato out of the garden.”