Students Learn from Community Garden

Maddy Buckly and Lana Mack

Many homes around the country boast a vegetable garden, or perhaps a row of containers on the porch overflowing with tomatoes, peppers and strawberries. And more and more people have been joining the ranks of home gardeners every season.

At the beginning of Spring quarter 2014, the Bellevue College Garden Club took steps to offer the BC community a gardening outlet east of the Greenhouse (K100) with a new ADA accessible teaching garden.

Though modest in size, the garden is packed with creative features that encourage food production by people of all ages and physical conditions. “It demonstrates highly productive planting methods that people can build or create wherever they live,” said garden coordinator Karrin Peterson. “The five words that informed the design are: accessible, affordable, productive, attractive, and edible.”

BC IDEA Garden
The BC IDEA Garden’s ADA-accessible raised beds allow for all interested students to participate.

The student garden club planted the seeds for the IDEA (Inspire, Develop, Empower, and Access) Garden. The garden was right next to the ADA parking lot and Mike Good, former club president, recalled a young man in a wheelchair who would sit and watch students working in the garden as he waited for a ride. He liked to garden, but only had a few plants in containers at home.

“One day, we carried him in, so he could help us pick tomatoes,” said Good. “That got all of us wondering how we could talk the campus into letting us knock a hole in that curb.”

With support from campus leadership, the garden club moved forward with plans for an ADA-accessible garden. They purchased the necessary materials with a grant from the Student Environmental Sustainability Fund and Peterson and her husband, Mark Boettcher, donated the labor to construct this experiential classroom.

“In a world of diminishing resources and increasing population, we believe the 21st century human must re-connect with food production – all of us, city dwellers, the young, the old, those of us living with limited mobility or other mental and physical challenges. Leaving the knowledge and ability to produce food solely in the hands of large corporations seems a bit like playing Russian roulette,” Peterson said. “And, perhaps more importantly, gardening builds bridges over cultural canyons – and cuts through barriers – that needlessly separate us from each other. Spend a summer tending a garden with a person; you’ll see what I mean.”

Karrin Peterson
Garden Coordinator,
Karrin Peterson says gardening is both
therapeutic and rewarding.

The mission of the IDEA Garden is to provide inspiration to all people through principles of universal design, support campus classes, and provide Bellevue College with its first learning center for horticultural therapy. The garden includes raised beds, wheel-chair and walker accessible passageways, containers, a model planting bed for sight impaired gardeners, an adaptive tool demonstration area, water-wise irrigation, and vertical planting systems for small space food production.

“We’ve got 22 strawberry plants, eight lettuce plants, eight edible flowers, and six kale plants growing in four square feet of ground space,” Peterson said. “Not to mention 48 corn plants growing in just nine square feet!”

Gardening seminars are offered to students, staff and the general public during the school year. Times and dates are posted through the Office of Sustainability and the Faculty Commons and everyone is always welcome.

– by Karrin Peterson & Evan Epstein

Last Updated October 3, 2016