A group of teenagers from the Corvallis Youth House in downtown Corvallis, started a garden in early spring on the front and side lawn of their community center and it is now in full bloom and maturity with daily harvesting of the myriad vegetables and flowers being cultivated there.
The original team of ten kids, under the supervision of Community Services Consortium (CSC), did the original planning, cultivating, starting the seedlings, transplanting and planting of seeds in early March. A new team has taken over maintaining the garden, harvesting the mature vegetables and flowers and will take them to the nearby Corvallis Farmer’s Market to sell.
CSC hoped the youth would learn about gardening and where their food comes from along with experience in sales and money management when the produce was sold at the farmer’s market. Any leftover produce after the farmer’s market is donated to the local non profit food share.
The garden is made up of forty raised bed garden boxes, each one four feet wide, six feet long and one foot high. The youth had a load of donated compost soil dumped in a nearby alley and filled the raised beds. The plants are flourishing.
The teenagers are meticulous in keeping the garden weed free and the plants responded to their care by growing vigorously.
The garden won a civic beautification award from the Corvallis Urban Forestry Commission. It is on a busy intersection and kitty corner from the Wednesday Farmer’s Market, so it turns a lot of heads as people go by.
The property was donated by a local business, Allann Bros. Coffee company. The garden is all organic and the youth treated the wooden raised bed boards with used cooking oil instead of a chemical preservative.
Later this summer a VISTA volunteer will help the youth create and implement a long term sustainability plan.
Those of us in the gardening industry are always hearing complaints about how the younger generation is not into gardening. Talking with a couple of the team members of the Corvallis Youth House Garden who were maintaining the garden when I stopped by, it seems once they start to plant the gardens and grow plants, they get hooked on gardening. We, as a society, just have to find ways to encourage and to get them started and the garden will do the rest.
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