Garden adds green to Wasilla

WASILLA — Community pride is a growing concern here.

Weeks after Councilwoman Taffina Katkus had an agriculture scientist talk to Wasilla City Council about the merits of community gardens, a handful of residents are busy cultivating their crops in the city’s new community garden boxes.

Located across from city hall on Herning Avenue, the garden incorporates 20-boxed plots with 15 spoken for so far.

One who cultivates his green thumb at the new garden is Craig Smith, the same scientist who gave that presentation. Smith works for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Palmer, but is a Wasilla resident. He said he’s “very surprised and pleased” with how quickly the city has embraced the concept of having a community garden.

“I’m very impressed,” he said. “That just goes to show how people who do various types of public works here in Alaska can move so fast. Just driving by, I saw it and they did a pretty good job.”

Katkus said she also is pleased, and said the plot across from city hall is just the beginning. She would like to create a community garden committee made up of city residents to formulate how the effort will evolve.

“I think it’s in phase I now, and phase II is going to be where the community’s invited to participate in committees and find out what the community really wants,” she said. “What I’m really trying to do is use the whole system and use the Parks and Recreation (Department), go through the planning and finally through the city council.”

Eventually, that evolution could be a single, larger community garden somewhere in the city, or several smaller gardens at various locations, she said.

That’s also the vision of city staff and administration, said Mayor Verne Rupright. He said expansion could involve other community garden plots at locations like the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center or Wonderland Park. While the future is still to be decided, Rupright said he didn’t see a reason to wait to get it started, so he carved out some money from his budget and asked the Public Works Department to start right away.

“We decided to just get ’er built and put it right here,” Rupright said. “It’s out there and has lots of flowers in it. It’s an idea that’s been kicked around by the Parks and Rec. Department for a long time. … Things like that are not cost prohibitive and are a good addition to the community.”

Aside from being a visual augmentation to a city, a community garden can be a valuable educational tool for families, Katkus said.

“I sure like to go out into the community and see kids playing in the parks and moms walking with kids,” she said. “If you give something to the community to own, they’ll care. This is part of telling the community they have something special and they own it.”

While city officials examine the next step in growing Wasilla’s community garden, Smith is busy tending his mustard greens, lettuce and carrots. More importantly, it puts him and his wife out into the public interacting with neighbors, he said.

“A community garden adds the same kind of value any public land space has,” he said. “It gets people out of their houses and puts them in a public space. Basically, it gives families a low-cost way to get out of the house and interact.”

Contact reporter Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.