By Naomi Granek Brown
Currently, the back yard of 3132 SE 67th Ave.—which hosts the Genesis Project, a local church, and the popular coffee shop The Porch—is an empty lot. But in just a few weeks, the vacant lawn will hold the South Tabor Demonstration Garden, open to the community, courtesy of Portland Edible Gardens.
Portland Edible Gardens is a local organization that supports home gardeners in growing their own food and produce. Primarily, they install custom garden beds and provide home gardeners hands-on support throughout the process of planting, growing and harvesting. As its founder and owner Ian Wilson says, “Portland is a place that really values…local food and sustainability.” Yet, he noticed that there was a lack of resources for “actually getting hands-on support [with] home vegetable gardening,” which inspired him to create Portland Edible Gardens in 2013.
Wilson describes Portland Edible Gardens’s mission as “trying to support home gardeners in being successful in growing their own food.” “There [are] so many benefits to growing your own food,” he says. “Spiritual, physical, communal, psychological. There’s a lot, a lot of benefits.” Namely, he notes that home gardening minimizes use of fossil fuels, pesticides and herbicides, allows people to eat healthier, spend more time outside and helps “foster a relationship with nature in one’s own space.” These benefits extend to community gardens as well.
To build the demonstration garden, Portland Edible Gardens is partnering with the Genesis Project, which Wilson describes as a church “rooted in building community…and making connections.” Wilson approached Brett Prior, Lead Pastor at the Genesis Project, about using part of the vacant lot in their backyard, and the project grew from there. Wilson says that Prior felt that the idea of starting the demonstration garden was well aligned with the church’s mission and a great extension of its role as a community hub. “We feel really excited about the way that this garden is going to be…another place for people to gather formally [and] informally, because it’s going to be a beautiful, productive garden space,” he says.
This will be Portland Edible Gardens’s second demonstration garden, though it is “the first one that has a lot of intention,” Wilson says. “We built a demonstration garden in North Portland about five years ago, but it…happened sort of spontaneously.” Portland Edible Gardens was building a garden for a customer who didn’t know what she wanted to do with the space, and they had “always wanted to have a communal space where we could teach classes, so that one was sort of the prototype.” Additionally, this garden is just across the street from Portland Edible Gardens headquarters, which will allow them additional ease when cultivating the garden and leading programming.
The garden, Wilson says, is “an amazing opportunity to continue to…advance our mission, and do it in a place that’s really close to home.” While he feels Portland Edible Gardens is very effective at supporting home gardeners being successful in growing their own food, he acknowledges that “not everyone can afford and access [the] services that we’re doing in people’s backyards,” so having a publicly accessible space where Portland Edible Gardens can offer the same educational services in a free context is “very exciting and really core to our mission.”
Portland Edible Gardens plans to host various community workshops and events in the garden. These classes will be donation based and open to all, realizing their goals of serving the community. In the future, Portland Edible Gardens plans to host monthly workshops from March to October focused on home vegetable gardening techniques, care and planting of berries and fruit, care of mason bees and similar topics.
Wilson is very excited about the garden and the opportunities it will bring. “I feel like I have a clear idea of a lot of the benefits of this garden, but I also am excited about all the unforeseen kinds of ways that this garden brings people together, and what it’s going to mean to have a space like this in the South Tabor neighborhood.”
The garden itself will be 35×38 feet, totaling 1,330 square feet, with six raised garden beds made of sustainable juniper lumber materials, automated irrigation and accessible pathways. Surrounding the border will be plantable space that Portland Edible Gardens plans to fill with herbs, berries and native and pollinator plants to support the garden ecosystem. In the future, they also plan to expand the scope of the garden to include a shed, more raised beds and an outdoor classroom. The garden will take up about a quarter of the lot, in the space directly along the sidewalk of SE 67th Ave.
The first stage of the garden—the construction of the raised beds, irrigation and planting spaces along its borders—is being funded by a grassroots giving campaign, with the goal of raising $12,000. As of July 22, $8,555 has been raised.
Portland Edible Gardens plans to donate produce from the garden to the food pantry at Kellogg Middle School, which they have an existing partnership with. At the time of publication, the garden will be mid-construction. The first community workshop (about growing fall and winter vegetables) is scheduled for Saturday, August 15, 10 am, as well as a party at 12 pm on the same day to celebrate its opening.
More information about the demonstration garden, including upcoming workshops and programming, can be found on Portland Edible Garden’s website.
A diagram of the new demonstration garden being built by Portland Edible Gardens. Image by Portland Edible Gardens.
