A whole host of garden plots are popping up in Anchorage thanks to a project aimed at getting more people gardening in Alaska's largest city.
Yarducopia ?is a project of Alaska Community Action on Toxics that's now in its fourth season. Michelle Wilber, the program's organic gardening coordinator, spends her spring meeting with landowners and volunteers and then setting out to build the plots across Anchorage.
The idea is simple: Get people with yard space connected with people who want to garden but don't have land. Then build a 100-square-foot garden plot, fill it with starter veggies and edible flowers and spend the summer caring for it. At the end of the season, donate 10 percent of the produce to the food bank and split the rest between the gardener and the resident.
Wilber said the broader goal is to eliminate barriers to those who want to garden, whether that's not having land, not knowing how to do it or not having the physical ability to garden.
The gardens are "lasagna" garden beds put together with layers of cardboard, covered with manure (Yarducopia uses horse manure sourced from local farms) and some "browns" -- usually dried grass clippings and fallen leaves. Wilber said not only are they good, fertile plots, they're also cheaper than buying topsoil.
Wilber said the 100-square-foot plots -- the equivalent of about one pickup truck load of materials -- are perfect for about two families looking to start what she calls a "grazing garden" for salad greens, a few heads of cabbage and some other veggies. The goal is to have the plots be simple enough for first-time gardeners to care for.
"We want people to be super successful their first year," she said.
Last year, 23 gardens were planted, Wilber said. She hopes to add another 20 by the end of the year, with at least five or six gardeners from last year offering up space to volunteers again.
That growth is being helped by a $75,000 grant from Council of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. That money will go toward expanding the program in schools and helping to develop a local food program in Port Heiden. In two years, the program hopes to add 40 local gardens in Anchorage, capable of growing vegetables for about 80 families.
Wilber asks for $100 from landowners to set up the garden and nothing from the volunteers. She said that fee isn't enough to cover the program, but it's enough to keep it going. There are currently more people with space than there are gardeners volunteering.
Wilbur tries to set up volunteers with yard space near where they live. Having neighbors connect is part of the community building the program hopes to achieve. Wilber said most matches have been successes.
Jocelyn Paine had Yarducopia build a plot in her South Addition front yard last year. Paine said she has no interest in gardening and initially looked forward to finding a way to cover up some of her lawn so she wouldn't have to mow it.
"I wanted to turn our useless front lawn into something much nicer," she said.
But there were some unexpected benefits. She found that the plants were kind of beautiful. And she got to meet her neighbor and start a friendship. Her neighbor lives in an apartment and doesn't have space to garden.
"We knew each other neighborly casual -- not very well," Paine said. "But now we've shared dirt."
Building up
Right now Wilber said the program is about as big as she can maintain as a one-woman operation. Not only does she help build the gardens -- which can take two to four hours depending on how many volunteers show up to assist -- but she checks in on them, making sure the gardens are thriving and offering advice on how to make them successful.
That's one of the reasons Connie Jensen was interested in participating in the program. She's tried gardening for three years since retiring as a nurse at Providence Hospital, even taking the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension master gardener class.
Jense said learning to garden has been kind of like a "science experiment."
"That I can't seem to get right," she said.
So last week she and her partner, Cameron Murray, daughter Gail Fletcher and 5-year-old grandson Mosley Dolezal worked with Wilber to build a lasagna plot at their East Anchorage home overlooking Waldron Lake.
Jensen said the garden will be a community effort between her and her neighbors. One neighbor has a yard that's too shaded to have a garden, while another has young children and not enough time to consistently take care of a garden.
Jensen has undergone treatment for breast cancer and recently had a knee replacement, so working with others was appealing. She hopes to build a tighter-knit community by having the backyard garden.
"It's all a big learning thing," she said. "And it's fun to experiment and see what happens."
In between hauling out wheelbarrows filled with still-steaming horse manure, Wilber offered up advice to Jensen. How to keep cats out of the garden? Lay down raspberry branches between rows of plants. What to do if slugs start invading? Create a trap using a scooped-out grapefruit rind.
Gardening is "alchemy, not a science," Wilber told Jensen.
Wilber knows the little plots will take years to add up to a significant increase in garden space in the city. But she hopes that the knowledge and lessons she teaches people get spread throughout Anchorage.
"I'm not sure how much of Anchorage is being transformed, but I know it's more than what we're doing," she said. "Every little bit helps."