Coordinator Jenna Kahly and volunteer Ilene Anderson are two of the community and church members tending Salem Community Garden at the church campus at 1111 30th Ave. S. (Photo/Nancy Hanson.)
Nancy Edmonds Hanson
Not everyone has access to a plot of soil to grow food for their family … nor, necessarily, the know-how to make it flourish.
The Salem Community Garden solves both challenges. Along with a handful of others that have taken root on empty ground throughout Moorhead, the acreage in the churchyard on 30th Avenue South is on the verge of a bumper crop that dozens of families are welcome to share.
Newly tilled in May, the generously sized growing area is part of a healthy trend in Moorhead, Fargo and the surrounding communities. “Instead of assigning smaller plots to individual families, we wanted to bring people together,” says Jenna Kahly, one of six leaders coordinating the churchyard acreage. “When people each must keep up their own plot, it can become divisive. Somebody doesn’t water. Somebody’s squash grows into the next plot. Not everybody weeds, and they spread to their neighbors.
“We don’t do individual plots. Instead, we are growing this together as one continuous garden, and then reaping the benefits together as a community. We’re working for the common good. Gardening can bring people together. I like to garden at home, too, of course, but it’s just more fun to share the work and the harvest.”
About 25 volunteers have come together to get the garden growing. The group includes members of both the church and community at large, including some who live in the neighborhood. They spend Monday evenings planting, weeding and watering their crops as their schedules permit, with a dozen or more pitching in each time.
Jenna, who was just named director of the West Fargo Public Library, is passionate about those possibilities. Along with the family gardens that have overtaken both front and back yards at her home north of Minnesota State University Moorhead, she has been involved in community gardening for years. She is one of the five program assistants who shepherd Fargo’s Growing Together sites; the new project at Salem follows that pattern, mentored by members of the Fargo eight-garden program.
Salem’s is far from the first community-style garden on the Minnesota side of the Red. It joins similar projects hosted by First Presbyterian, First Congregational and Brookdale Baptist churches, as well as the gardening going back nine years at Ellen Hopkins Elementary’s Nature Play Park.
The new garden was one of three that received $500 grants from the city in May, issued through the Onward Moorhead Comprehensive Plan. Other recipients included Brookdale Baptist Church and the Grateful Community Garden at 2900 Fifth St. S. The project has attracted both cash and in-kind donations. Supplies and services have come from many quarters. Most of the seeds came from the Moorhead Public Library’s free seed program, along with veteran gardeners who save seed from their own gardens. Farm in the Dell, which holds meetings at the church, brought its tractor and tiller to open the ground. The Tomato Seed-Savers Club donated seeds for a host of varieties of the favorite fruit. A farmer donated straw to mulch the rows of seedlings.
Its location on the south side of Salem’s 4.4-acre churchyard gives the garden a strategic benefit. “We were looking for a way to use that space for the benefit of our community,” Jenna says. “This neighborhood is one of the most diverse in the city. Many of our neighbors don’t have the transportation to travel to other sites to grow or to get healthy food for their families.”
Some of those neighbors are among the 25 or so who have labored to plant, tend and now gather this first year’s harvest. They started in May, an unusually late start due to the oddities of spring 2023. Nevertheless, their rows of every vegetable you can name are flourishing. Harvest started in mid-June with lettuce, Swiss chard, kale, radishes and a bouquet of tasty herbs. Summer squash and a rainbow of tomatoes – many of them heritage varieties – are beginning to redden up, along with pole beans, bush beans, sweet and hot peppers, four kinds of cucumbers, eggplants and cantaloupes. Soon to come: onions, carrots, beets, kohlrabi, potatoes, winter squash, pumpkins and gourds.
“We were going to plant hollyhocks, but then a member asked for okra,” Jenna adds. Hollyhocks, out; okra, in.
Those who work in the garden share its bounty. “We divide everything we harvest equally into boxes,” Jenna says. “Then we put out another where people can give back what they don’t want.” As the harvest overruns their appetites, the oversupply will be shared in gift boxes for families in need.
Some of the volunteer gardeners are experts with a lifetime of experience. Others call themselves newbies, eager to learn more about tending the earth. Along with hands-on learning, education has been introduced, with sessions on weed identification and insects – both beneficial pollinators and pests. Some of the advice has come from the volunteers themselves. “Everybody brings something,” Jenna notes. “Some of our New American neighbors were farmers in their own countries, and they’ve shared techniques,” Jenna says. “It’s been really fun to learn from each other.”
Like other farmers, Jenna and the Salem gardeners are already looking ahead to next year. “We’d love to add more perennials – asparagus, rhubarb, maybe apple and cherry trees,” she suggests. A picnic area could encourage those who pick the bounty to enjoy them on the spot.
In the meantime, the community garden is bringing joy to both the gardeners and those who have watched the garden grow. Jenna sums it up: “We want to use our land to be a blessing to this neighborhood.”
