Manchester Community Garden - Teaching a Lifeskill to Students
The Manchester Community Garden lets residents in the Manchester School District rent a garden plot for a season to plant, grow and harvest their own produce.
A great way to beat the winter blues is to start planning your garden. Looking through seed catalogues, reading gardening magazines, checking out landscaping books from the library. Even if your body is stuck in endless Michigan winter, your mind can wander through next summer’s garden, feeling the soil, smelling the flowers, tasting the vegetables. What if you have no garden because you have no yard, or your yard is too shady? No problem. The Manchester Community Garden has plots to rent for this coming summer, and the application is available right now.
The Community Garden is located on Klager Elementary School Drive, across from the athletic fields, off of Dutch Drive. Plots will be plowed and ready for planting in early May. Everyone is responsible for planting, weeding and harvesting their own plot. The Community Garden waters the whole garden on a regular schedule and provides a hose and water source for supplementary watering. They also provide mulch, compost, and are available for advice, every step of the way.
Garden plots available include 4’x4’ raised beds, perfect for beginners, for $10 for the season, 10‘x10’ plots for $15, waist-high 4’x8’x4’ raised beds for gardeners with limitations for $20, and 20‘x20’ plots for $40, for experienced gardeners.
Klager students preparing the Klager garden for planting in spring.
The garden has a close relationship with the schools. In addition to being located on Manchester Community School property, the Community Garden Committee also works with students to maintain separate gardens at Klager Elementary and Manchester Early Childhood Center. This includes teaching students to start seeds, plant, weed, pick vegetables and eat them. The staff even uses the vegetables in snacks and lunches for the students.
Teaching kids how to pick vegetables is the best part of managing the gardens for Ruth Van Bogelen, who heads up the Committee. She said, “When we start working with a group of students, often they don't know how to pick the vegetables and often they use the words ‘I don't like.....’. Just a little instruction and they are Pros at picking veggies and almost always like everything. Then those kids show other kids how to pick and so on and so on. You can easily see that the garden has an immediate impact on their lives - for their lifetime.”
Klager Kids Club kids picking vegetables out of their Community Garden Plot to sell at the Klager Farmers Market last summer.
"If you give someone vegetables, they might eat them. But if you teach someone to garden, they eat vegetables their whole life"
There are students involved in the Community Garden too, While the majority of the garden is rented by residents, the Klager Summer Camp program used four 20‘x20’ plots last summer to grow produce for and run a farmers market at Klager every Monday. It was by donation and open to the public. They almost always sold out and averaged about $80 a week. They even looked up nutritional information, prepared recipes to hand out and made bags for their customers (out of T-shirts) to carry produce.
The Community Garden grew out of the children’s gardens at the schools but all of it actually began in 2006 when Ruth asked her grandson if he wanted to pick and eat some strawberries in her garden and he responded "Strawberries come from the grocery store." This started churning inside her head. Ruth explained, “I talked to lots of people and learned this was a common misconception. Kids gardens seemed like an ‘opportunity’ for youth in Manchester. In 2010 after exploring options in parks around town, I learned about the an abandoned flower garden at Klager. We turned that garden into a vegetable garden with raised beds. The students really like planting and tasting. The rule was to taste everything and spit out what you didn't like.”
The Kids Club ran the Klager Farmers Market on Mondays with the produce they grew and harvested in Community Garden plots.
In 2011, at the students’ request, Ruth got permission to plant a pumpkin patch on school property. With no fencing, the deer munched away at this new garden. Ruth recalled, “We would go up in the evening and a half dozen deer would be in the garden and we'd have to chase them out.” Even with the deer, they harvested over 60 pumpkins.
The pumpkin patch evolved into the Community Garden. “The next winter I was talking to Andy Supers and he said he would like to start a community garden in Manchester. I had heard about the community garden in Dexter. We went to Dexter, learned what they were doing, and replicated it in Manchester,” said Ruth. That first year, they had no problem renting all of the available plots to Manchester residents. In 2013, they doubled the size of the garden, and again rented all of the plots.
Everything grown in the Community Garden is grown organically without chemical fertilizers or pesticides.
It wasn’t easy though. The area the garden is built on “is like a gravel pit with heavy clay,” Ruth said, “So we have picked a lot of rocks. The ‘we’ is the students from Klager. In 10 minutes, the students have picked rocks and made a huge pile.” The Lamb Farm on Lamb Road has donated several hundred yards of organic lamb compost which is added every year to improve the garden’s soil. “It will continue to get better every year,” Ruth said.
The interest in the Community Garden keeps exceeding the expectations of the committee. Last year, seven Klager classrooms participated, 22 families (about 75 residents) used plots in the Community Garden, and additional numbers enjoyed watching things grow as they walked by and benefitted by visiting the Klager Farmers Market. Ruth set a longterm goal in 2010, to have the garden project get 500 people into gardening. She said, “That goal was met so fast, it needed to be increase 100 fold to 50,000 even to be a challenge.”
This photo shows some of the new garden expansion built in 2013. You can see the older half of the garden in the background.
Every year the Committee makes improvements to the garden. Last year, they doubled the size and added the raised beds for gardeners with physical limitations. This year they are switching from netting as a fence to keep the deer out to a stronger metal fence. They are also expanding the focus from “a community garden to a community of gardeners.” They are starting a seed bank at the library and offering gardening classes, and this is just the beginning. What does the future hold? Ruth answers with a question, “Can you imagine taking a walk through town and finding lots of examples of edible landscaping!”
If you are interested in obtaining a plot for this summer, you can download the plot application HERE. If you have questions about the community garden or would like more information, visit the website by clicking HERE, email dutchgardenpartner@gmail.com or call (734) 428-9461 and ask for Andy.
Klager Kids Club holding bags full of produce they've harvested from their Community Garden plots.
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