Idaho Falls Community Garden Association

Today I'm talking with Kristi at Idaho Falls Community Garden Association. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kristi at Idaho Falls Community Garden Association. Wow, that's a mouthful. Good morning, Kristi. How are you? Good morning. Hi. Doing good? Good.

00:30
I have a goal to talk to as many community garden places as I can in 2025, and I think you're the first one, Christy, so tell me about yourself. Lived in Idaho for almost 50 years now, came from Colorado. Got involved with community gardens when my kids were teenagers and growing more independent by the moment.

00:59
and we were all looking for something to put some energy into. And I came to the idea of getting a community garden started here in our small town. Oh, so it's your baby. Well, myself and, you know, three or four other people were part of the original group who started it. I have.

01:29
maintain my connection with it since we started it in 1995. So, yeah. That's amazing. Congratulations. I love that. Oh, thank you. Well, tell me about the community garden. How does it work? Well, we have now three community gardens. Our town is roughly 60,000 people, so it's not huge. We started with a single garden of about a quarter acre.

01:58
And within a couple of years, we started a second one in another part of town that's about a half an acre. And then five years after that, we started a third one that is a full acre. That was in 2003. And the gardens are open to the public.

02:24
Anybody can garden there. We have a formal registration every year where people sign up and get a plot assigned. Then they have their own garden space, including access to water. They bring their own tools and hoses and all that kind of stuff. They're free to grow whatever they want as long as it's legal and doesn't intrude into the spaces of a garden.

02:54
nearby gardeners. There's an annual cost, which up until this year was $40 for new gardeners. And then if you are a gardener in good standing, which means you've participated for one full summer and met all the membership requirements, which primarily

03:19
involve taking care of your own plot and then contributing to the community areas of the garden with eight hours of effort over the course of the whole season. So if you've done that, then your fee for the following years, as long as you maintain that standing, is half the original cost.

03:47
We have garden coordinators at each garden who are gardeners there and it's their challenge and Responsibility to keep the gardeners engaged to be sure that there's nobody causing problems in the garden to help people who are Maybe beginning gardeners pair them up with other gardeners who have more experience or help them themselves if they have time

04:17
And they participate in our board meetings so that they can give us feedback and tell us what they need and how things are going. And that's been the evolution over these now 30 years.

04:36
Some things have changed, but the basic premise and process is similar to when we started. Wow, that is super cool. So I feel like not only are you growing plants, you're growing friendships with this community. Well, that was a large part of the motivation in the beginning was to build a place.

05:04
where people in the community could gather to share a common interest in gardening and growing stuff and exploring new varieties and learning how to do things in new ways with people that they may or may not have a lot in common with otherwise. And it's a really good way to build a sense of community that is not founded on religious beliefs or political beliefs, but on a common interest in

05:34
seeing delicious, beautiful things growing. That's a wonderful premise, Kristy. I'm so glad you started a community garden. That's amazing. So how big is the smallest plot that someone can get? Well, you know, that's pretty negotiable. Our smallest formal plot is about 10 by 10, so 100 square feet.

06:04
But if a gardener comes and they're new or they know their time constraints are forbidding or they just want less space, we're happy to divide a plot and give them half a 10 by 10. Typically people want larger plots rather than smaller plots, but we have had it happen that somebody says, well that's just too much for me. And the garden coordinators, it's

06:33
at their discretion, they can just divide the plot and say, okay, here's what you need, use this. So that's how, and the largest plot is probably 20 by 30, which is a lot. And that takes an experienced gardener to really keep control of that. One of the things that we learned over the years is that when a new gardener comes in,

07:02
who is also a beginning gardener, we give them a small plot to start with. And as their expertise and experience and their understanding of what kind of time and energy it takes grows, then they can scale up to a larger plot if they wish. Well, that makes a lot of sense because I feel like when you're a beginning gardener, your eyes are bigger than your stomach when it comes to the space.

07:31
It's funny you say that because we just had a gardening class. We do a series of free gardening classes in the winter, and our last one was on garden planning. And one of the people commented that as an experienced gardener, they still do that. You know, they plant more than they can use or plant more than they can take care of. And it's one of the challenges for both the gardens, the garden coordinator,

08:00
and the new gardener is to be sure that they have a plot that won't lead them to be discouraged by mid-summer and give up. A small plot is one that a new gardener can maintain and keep adequate control of so that they make it through the whole season and they get to the bonus at the end, which is the harvest.

08:28
If they start out with too large a plot, it is not uncommon for them to be overwhelmed by the middle of July and they just disappear, which is what led us to start saying, okay, let's start our new gardeners out in a smaller plot so they can have success.

08:48
I love that you care about the people who are trying to do this. That's what that means. Yes. We want people to find the same joy and satisfaction in growing stuff that those of us with lots of experience know is part of the process. If you just hang in there. Mm-hmm. Yep. It...

09:12
It never occurs to me how big our farm to market garden is on our property until I talk to somebody about actual plot sizes because you said 10 by 10 and I was like, oh yeah, it's 100 feet. Our farm to market garden is 100 feet by 150 feet. And I never really think about how much of a garden that is until I think about what that comes out to when you multiply it. When you do the square footage, yeah, that's a lot of space to take care of.

09:42
Yes, and when it produces, it's great. We have enough for us, we have enough for family and friends, we have enough for the farmers market. Unfortunately, last summer we had barely enough for the farmers market because our growing season was terrible for 2024. No water? No, too much water at the beginning of the spring. Oh.

10:07
Six weeks of rain, I swear to you. I told my husband, I said, you're going to have to build an ark here soon. Yeah, that is such a challenge. We don't face that in Idaho, except very irregularly. But we have, for instance, last summer, we had a frost on the 20th or 23rd of June. And you know, that's another set of challenges that...

10:37
Make being part of a community garden a benefit because you're there with people who have been growing in this particular environment for, in some cases, 20 years. And they can give you a heads up. You know, it might frost in June, so pay attention to the weather reports and have something ready to cover your tender plants if they're in the ground. And a beginning gardener at home doesn't necessarily have that.

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expertise at hand. No, we have Google. We have Google for beginner gardeners and Google is great and YouTube is great and friends who have grown gardens for a few years are great. But when it's going to rain for six weeks straight, there's not a whole lot you can do. Nobody can help you out of that one. Oh, it was so sad, Christy. My husband and I were just looking each other after the fourth week like, wow, this year's gonna suck.

11:36
And I said to my husband, I said, are you going to be really mad if we don't produce anything this summer? And he was like, nope. He said, there's always next year. That's right. That's another beauty of gardening is that if it fails this year, there's another opportunity to try it next year. Yeah. I told him I was very proud of him that his thinking was very progressive and that I loved him for it. So I understand that.

12:03
people or couples or whatever are renting out the space to grow gardens. Do you have like a section for you and your helpers to grow too? And do you donate any of that food to the community or how does that work? Is that a thing? Each garden has its own garden coordinator. I do not personally garden in any of the gardens. I have space at my house where I can grow.

12:32
But I've been involved with our children's gardening program that lasted about, we just ended it two or three years ago. And it had been going on for 20 plus years. So I have experience in the gardens.

12:51
with the kids, but I haven't personally grown a garden there. The garden coordinators and the gardeners in their garden have garden meetings where they decide, you know, we have three extra plots. What are we going to do with those? And very often, those are put into production for donation. It's not required. It's up to the individual gardens. But.

13:19
I would say all of our gardens are donating a nice to significant amount of produce to our local food banks or soup kitchens each summer. And occasionally we have a gardener who is really gung-ho about that. One year one of our gardens donated over a thousand pounds of vegetables because they were very organized.

13:49
had excess produce to contribute it instead of just letting it go to waste. And that's a big task, but they did a really nice job of getting all of that in hand. Phenomenal. I'm so glad that that's happening because there's so much food waste in our country, you know? And if someone has put their blood, sweat, and tears into growing produce,

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and they can't use all of it, why not donate it to someone who needs it? Yeah. It just makes me sad to see a tomato rotting on the ground when it could be in the hands of somebody who would really enjoy it. Yeah, I'm going to call him a friend. The president of the food shelf in the town that I live in is a friend. We just met him like four years ago, but he's become a friend. He and his wife are great people. And two summers ago,

14:46
We asked him if they could use garden ripe tomatoes. And he said, we will take every tomato you want to give us. And so for like a month and a half, he would come by every couple of weekends and just take boxes of tomatoes to the food shelf. And it saved us because we weren't gonna be able to deal with them. And I feel like we actually contributed something to our community and we live outside of town. So we're rarely ever in town.

15:15
So we at least felt like we gave back, even though we don't really know a lot of people in our community, if that makes any sense at all. Oh, yeah. I think the idea of avoiding waste and at the same time doing something that benefits other people is a win-win. And we really encourage our gardeners to get, our garden coordinators to get.

15:43
something organized in their gardens so that they can harvest all that extra stuff and put it to good use.

15:55
Absolutely. Did I see on your Facebook page or your website that you guys do classes as well? Yes. Tell me about the classes. Well, it's part of our organization mission to provide educational opportunities about organic gardening to the community. So almost continuously since the beginning, we've had

16:23
at least some classes. Initially, we tried to do them in the summer, but in Idaho, nobody wants to be inside doing a class in the middle of summer. So over time, that morphed into doing them in the winter, January and February, which is a great time here because we're inside, it's cold and not any...

16:50
opportunity for gardening activities outside, so people are much more willing to come to classes. They are all taught from the framework of organic gardening. They are free and open to the public, not just to our community gardeners. We have a team of people on our board who are our education committee.

17:17
They put together a list of classes for a given season, find instructors for them. Very often that comes from our board or our garden coordinators or experienced gardeners. And then we publish the schedule and we have a facility. We've had to upgrade our facilities multiple times because when we first started, there'd be maybe a dozen people. And...

17:47
For our last initial class, this session, for the first one, is what I mean to say, of this session, we had 86 people attend. And so we have had to change venues several times. But we're pretty stable now. We've been in these classrooms at the university nearby. And we provide probably six, no, I would say eight or nine classes.

18:17
once a week through part of January into the beginning of March. People are free to donate if they wish, but they can come to the class without any obligation because we really just want to teach people that despite what we were told the first season, we started a garden in Idaho Falls by a

18:46
by a local farmer that we'd never be able to grow anything organically here. We have beautiful organic gardens and we want people to know how to do that, how to build their soil and take care of their space so that not only do they benefit from the harvest of it, but they leave it as good or better than it was for whoever's coming after them. Well, sure. Of course.

19:16
And who, there's a story here, I know there is. Who told you you couldn't grow organic produce? Well, this was in 1995. And we were looking for help to prep the area of our first garden. And I contacted a local farmer who was kind of a big time farmer, had some big equipment because we needed a bulldozer or a plow or something.

19:45
And I told him what we were doing and what kind of help we needed. And his comment was, oh, I drive by that place every day on my way to work. You'll never be able to grow anything organically here. You know, it was 30 years ago and people had a very black and white picture of organic gardening and in Idaho in particular, where we have a pretty

20:16
divided world view among some people. Organic gardening just seemed like some la la idea that, you know, floated out of California and was never going to be possible in Idaho. And a few years later, it was probably about 10 years later, we had one of our sprouts kids grew

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a six pound broccoli in her organic garden. And we put a picture of it up somewhere. And I remember thinking, I hope that guy sees this and gets to reconsider his position that this was impossible, because of course it wasn't. The best revenge is living well, Kristy, I swear to you. Okay, I was very confused because as far as I know,

21:13
You can grow organic produce pretty much anywhere as long as you have a space and you can make a raised bed. Well, I think part of the mindset back then was that our soil was not suitable for growing things. It had to have chemical fertilizers. It had to have pest control. It had to have weed control in order to make it possible.

21:43
which was a common view then. And I think in the intervening 30 years, there's been an enormous shift and people have come to appreciate that if you take care of your soil, if you focus on building your soil rather than throwing Twinkies on your vegetables, which is how I look at chemical fertilizers, that you...

22:11
you can have a beautiful garden without all of those chemical additions. But, you know, people had to learn that. They had to see it in practice. One of our local horticulturalists, who was a professor at a local university, was not an organic proponent at all. And over the years, between

22:40
the mid-90s and maybe 10 years ago, his whole perspective shifted and he started advocating not that you could only do it that way, but that this was perfectly doable and a good choice. And so I think that was emblematic of the kinds of shifts and thinking that happened in those initial years of our community garden. Thank goodness.

23:09
Uh-huh. You were saying that the first class that you did, you only had like 12 or 20 people show up in this first class of this session. You had 80-something people show up? Yeah. I'm glad to hear that people are hungry for gardening information. It is really rewarding. And another really positive change that we've seen prior to about...

23:35
three or four years ago, we were doing our classes on Saturday. And our audience was primarily older people. There were a few young people, but primarily older people. And for other reasons, this, a few years ago, we switched to a midweek class in the evening, as opposed to a Saturday morning class. And the most

24:05
The positive result of that is that the number of young people attending our classes has skyrocketed. And I would say we now have a greater proportion of, you know, 20s, 30s, 40s people in our classes than people older than that, which is something that we are really pleased to see because it bodes well for the future.

24:34
Yes, do you have couples come as a date night thing during the week? Or why is it younger people coming?

24:45
No, I mean, we do have couples come in every age range. We've had some very elderly folks show up. We've had clearly, you know, teenagers. But I think...

25:00
It's more just individuals coming sometimes with friends, a lot of times on their own, because they're interested. They wanna know, you know, what is, I want, especially young people, I think are much more attuned to the value of organic gardening. And so since we're offering them an opportunity to learn what that's about and how to do it.

25:30
They're just interested. I'm just wondering why the big shift between having it on Saturday and having it in the evening on a weeknight. Oh, our theory about that is that they've got stuff to do on Saturday, man. They don't wanna be sitting around a classroom. And on a weeknight, they're already committed, whether it's work or school, their week is pretty much lined out.

25:55
and adding an evening event is more doable than taking up their Saturday morning. Yeah, that's what I was thinking because I know our weekends are packed full with Aaron running and stuff, so that would make sense. Okay, so you said that the community garden has been going for 30 years, is that right? Yeah, 30 years this year. Okay, so is it going to be going for another 30 years, do you hope, or more?

26:24
Well, you know, everything has a lifetime. And so I would hesitate to extrapolate too far out into the future. But one of the things that we have done is tried to move the membership of our board also to a younger demographic so that when us oldies but goodies are ready to stop, there are.

26:55
younger people who are engaged and committed who will move things forward. We have really wonderful support from our city. They have been behind us from the beginning, even though we are not directly affiliated with the city. So that bodes well for the future. They have a... They are in fact... It was our city...

27:24
and my contact with one of our city personnel that very first year, and I cold called him and said, here's what we wanna do, is there any way that you can help us? And his response was to say, well, is Thursday soon enough? And it's been like that from the beginning. It's gotten more complicated

27:55
The world has gotten more complicated and we now lease our our places from the city but The general supportive nature of the relationship with our city is really good and so that bodes well as I said for continuing into You know as many years as there are people who need a place to grow Well

28:22
There are a couple of really encouraging things that you just said. Number one, the city is happy to work with you, which is really amazing because sometimes cities are like, eh, we're not really interested in that. And the second part is that you have young people really interested in this. And you're right. The young people are the ones who are still going to be here when we're gone. And they're going to be our age at some point, and they're going to need to hand it off to their young people. So

28:50
I'm excited that there are young people who are interested in doing this because I really feel like 30 years ago when I was 25, there weren't as many young people interested in this. And I feel like COVID might've had a hand in swinging how people see where their food comes from. I think that's definitely the case.

29:21
all three of our gardens over the COVID period. And some of those were very ephemeral, you know, they were there for a summer or part of a summer and then disappeared. But others, and this has always been the case in the community gardens, others have really embraced it and gotten very involved and obviously love it. And I think one of the lessons we learned

29:52
in the beginning was that don't expect every person who puts their toe in this water to want to dive in. You know, there are a lot of people who think it's a great idea, oh yeah, I want to do that. And then they find out that it requires more time and effort and energy than they're willing to commit and they move on. And at first that was a very disconcerting. Now we've learned that that's okay. Those people are going a different direction.

30:22
We love the ones who do stick around and who do want to be involved and who get engaged because they're the ones that secure the future of the gardens for the next bunch. Absolutely. And I actually just had a thought pop into my head about what you're doing. You know how church is full of people from different backgrounds and different ages and obviously different genders?

30:49
and it's a big melting pot of all types of people. I feel like the community garden is like that too. And so if you have older people who are gardening and younger people who are gardening, you know they're gonna chat. Sure. So it's like a church, but it's wrapped around gardening, not around the Bible. So that's kind of cool. So Christy, I try to keep these to half an hour, and we're at 31 minutes and 12 seconds, so I'm gonna let you go.

31:17
Thank you so much for your time today. And if people want to get involved in community gardens, if they're in your area, I will have the link to your website in the show notes. But for the listeners out there, there are community gardens everywhere in the United States. So if you wanna look into finding one, I bet if you just typed in your general area, community garden, wherever you live, you could probably find one. I think you're right.

31:43
And thank you so much for the conversation. It's been enjoyable. Yeah, I loved it. Thank you, Kristy. Have a great day. You too. Bye bye.