Sprouting up

The Ridge House and the Boys and Girls Club of Truckee Meadows’ Sun Valley Teen Center (BGC) have recently teamed up to create a community garden for Sun Valley.

BGC started the garden last year, but the Ridge House joined earlier this year. Taft Barnett of AmeriCorps VISTA, who works at the Ridge House, came up with the idea to start a garden for their clients. The Ridge House helps its clients with re-entering into civilian life after prison and with substance abuse counseling. It wanted to start a garden to help this process.

“It’s very therapeutic, so people who are recovering from addiction and recovering from a criminal lifestyle, that sort of a thing—being out in a garden is very peaceful, it’s rewarding, it’s confidence-building,” Barnett said. “It kind of connects you to nature and life, which is a really powerful tool in healing.”

He and John Collins, workforce development coordinator at The Ridge House, went to a screening of a movie about community gardens recommended to them by the USDA Cooperative Extension office.

“People started mentioning these community gardens around town that were struggling, and one thing that The Ridge House has is labor force,” Barnett said. “A lot of our clients, when they’re not working, we require them to do community service to stay productive. And we thought, well, if we have the space, and they have the labor, and they’re struggling to get people involved—maybe we should start approaching some of these struggling gardens and see if we can help them, and they can help us.”

It led them to the BGC’s garden in Sun Valley.

Currently, the garden has 12 wooden beds—these are the BGC’s—and six plastic beds that are The Ridge House’s, three of which are planted. There is also one struggling row of pumpkins that belong to the BGC. In the beds, the groups have planted a variety of different things including strawberries, watermelons, squash, beans, kale, basil and cilantro. And the Ridge House has a bed filled with tomato plants in pots that haven’t been planted in the ground yet because they’re lacking in soil, which should be coming soon.

“We’ve gotten a lot of really great community support from Home Depot,” Barnett said. “They donated all of the soil we have right now, and in the next week or so, they’re going to be coming up and installing some automatic irrigation and helping us fill up the rest of the beds.”

Barnett also said that Home Depot has been talking about creating more planters and rows in the space as well. He was especially excited about the irrigation, though, because they’ve currently had to send someone up daily from their office in Reno to water each of the beds from one hose. BGC has also been watering the beds.

“We’re really hoping that we can turn this into a sort of community project up here in Sun Valley,” Barnett said. “Sun Valley is a food desert. There’s not really a lot of options for things like fresh produce out here, so one of the things we’re trying to do is for this to grow into a space where the community can come garden. As you can see, it’s not really much of that now. But also, we were thinking about starting a little vegetable stand. We’re talking to the Food Bank about being able to accept EBT—or I guess they call it SNAP now—so that the community members can come down here and buy produce, ideally that’s grown in Sun Valley, but we’re thinking that to get started, we’ll have to buy from other Nevada growers.”