Where community blooms

Nestled on the Clovis/northeast Fresno border is a community garden that stemmed from a single idea and has blossomed into an educational center, fundraising opportunity and great community resource.

On less than a third of an acre of land donated by Unitarian-Universalist Church on Alluvial Avenue between Willow and Chestnut avenues, Alluvial Community Garden houses a tool shed, a compost pile and 24 garden beds that are leased for use by anyone in the Clovis and Fresno community.

“The church gave us the land to use, and with that there was a group of six of us who, over the next months, developed this into a community garden,” said Betty Cornelison, the garden’s director.

They’ve gotten a lot of help along the way.

The group secured a couple of grants, and in March 2011 a group of 10 students from the Jan and Bud Richter Center for Community Engagement and Service-Learning at Fresno State helped build the garden’s first seven beds.

All of the beds use drip irrigation, thanks to a donation from Jain Irrigation, Inc., Cornelison said. Evergreen Garden Center, a nursery in Clovis, contributed to a demonstration garden of drought-tolerant plants, a group of people volunteered to build a shed, and Adolph’s A-1 Tree Company donates wood chips for the garden’s ground cover.

Gardeners pay an annual fee based on the size of their plot to cover the cost of the water used to irrigate their crops. There are other obligations as well.

“Every third Saturday is a work day for the general maintenance of the garden,” Cornelison said.

Anything the gardeners grow in their bed — flowers, fruits, vegetables and herbs — they can consume, share, trade or donate.

“One of the most exciting things is we are growing the produce in the first bed to raise money for the food bank,” said Michelle DeLaBarre, a Clovis resident who has leased a bed in the garden since its beginning more than four years ago. “On Sundays at least once a month we offer the produce to the church membership, and then we take those donations and give it to the food bank as cash.”

“We realized that a little handful of tomatoes isn’t really going to help the food bank, but cash will … and we’ve raised almost $400 to donate to the food bank (since August 2014).”

Gardeners also donate any excess produce they harvest for the Sunday offering. Churchgoers select from tomatoes, eggplants, herbs and myriad other vegetables. The gardeners are hoping to harvest sweet potatoes in time for Thanksgiving.

“There’s an international flavor to our garden,” said DeLaBarre, explaining that one gardener is Nigerian and has been teaching fellow gardeners about growing and cooking with amaranth.

Two Hmong women also leased two beds and grew a variety of vegetables used in Asian dishes, and a family from Israel brought their own gardening style while they leased two beds, DeLaBarre said.

“We’re all sharing each other’s knowledge,” she said.

In January the gardeners will host a seed exchange program and encourage each other, along with members of the community, to bring any seeds they are willing to share.

The gardeners also work to educate children of the church, students at a newly opened Montessori preschool called The Cottage, as well as the public.

“We’ve had a composting class from the garden; we’ve had a class on how to preserve your vegetables through freezing…Those things are open to the community,” Cornelison said. “We consider ourselves an education center as well as a garden, for gardening, for bird life, for nutrition.”

On Sundays, the the church’s youngest members come out to three plots reserved for them and learn about compost and growing their own food, she added.

Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts have worked in the garden to earn badges, and one high school girl earned her Girl Scouts Gold Award by learning about compost from the gardeners and putting together a DVD and handouts on the topic, Cornelison said.

“This is a great resource to the community,” she said.

Fresno Audubon Society donated a beautifully painted sign by local artist Kathleen Maddox that stands in the southeast corner of the garden to educate people about local birdlife.

A ponding basin behind the garden draws a wide variety of birds to the area, Cornelison said.

“A family that lives in the neighborhood come to look at this Audubon bird sign and teach their children the birds of the neighborhood,” she said.

The site attracts other visitors who don’t necessarily want to get their hands dirty, but rather just stroll through and enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of the garden.

“It’s soothing to the soul,” DeLaBarre said. “The new minister (at Unitarian-Universalist Church) came to the garden just to recharge.”

The perimeter of the garden is lined with perennials such as lavender that court beneficial insects to the garden, like ladybugs, green lacewings and a specific type of wasp.

Some plots are planted with flowers that attract pollinators, like hummingbirds, bees and butterflies.

Because the garden is organic — pesticides aren’t allowed — the gardeners research ways to combat pests.

April Hoffman, DeLaBarre’s daughter, discovered a cover crop that combats nematodes, a type of roundworm, and also serves as green manure for the crops.

“When the cover crop gets up to a certain height, we essentially chop it up and put it back into the soil, and it releases almost like a deterrent to the root-knot nematodes,” Hoffman said. “Nematodes use the plant’s water themselves and our plants end up dying off. So this is a great way to take out those nematodes as well as the cover crop helps add nitrogen to the soil.”

There are about 30 gardeners currently leasing plots, and several have come and gone over the last four years, Cornelison said.

“We’ve had a lot of interesting people who’ve been a part of this garden,” she said. “We have a couple of beds open, but we always are anxious to have new gardeners any time there’s a turnover.”

A lot of gardeners, like Hoffman, live in apartments, which leaves them with little space to garden on their own.

“We have no space to garden at our apartment except for in pots, and of course we are trying to be water conscious, so having the garden here allows us to grow the larger crops that we want in a larger bed area,” she said.

John Niño, the garden’s grounds manager, also lives in a Clovis apartment and says gardening and maintaining the compost pile is therapeutic.

“You don’t have to open a gate or have someone let you in,” he said. “You can come in at midnight if you wanted and work on it as long as you want to.”

This story was originally published September 15, 2015 at 5:25 PM with the headline "Where community blooms."