This year, Gardening Know How’s School and Community Garden Sponsorships was fortunate enough to help support 15 gardens with $1,000 each. These gardens represent a wide array of community and school programs, from Canada to Puerto Rico and many places in between. Each has its own unique and powerful story, and we’re excited to share them with you. Once a month we’ll highlight one of our sponsorship recipients to help spread the word about how amazing they really are. This month we’re featuring the Big White Mountain Community Garden of Kelowna, British Columbia.
Big White Mountain is a ski resort area in British Columbia, Canada. The community that lives there is small and often coming and going, but the Big White Mountain Community Development Association is working hard to change that. Enter the Big White Mountain Community Garden, a new program started in the summer of 2016.
The garden is open to members of all ages, professions, and income brackets, bringing them together toward a common goal and fostering a sense of community that has been hard to find. People come together in the garden to work, laugh, and get to know one another. And, of course, they come to enjoy the fruits of their labors too. Big White Mountain is isolated, and normally fresh produce is a 60 kilometer drive away. But thanks to the garden, community members have direct access to produce that couldn’t be fresher. This year they even put together a free community meal at a local restaurant using the vegetables they’d grown.
While the Big White Mountain Community Garden is doing wonders for community spirit, it’s also attracting some unwanted members: deer. With no way to keep them out, they’ve lost considerable portions of their crops to grazing. The bulk of the sponsorship funds from Gardening Know How will go toward installing a deer fence. The rest will be used to purchase tools to get the garden running more efficiently.
With Gardening Know How’s help, this little community garden should be able to do what community gardens do best: bring people together over fresh air, good food, and the spirit of togetherness. What could be better than that?
