Garden getting ready for summer
On a two-acre field next to the townhouse neighborhood of the Presque Isle Housing Authority, a young community garden is growing in its second year.
Over the long Memorial Day weekend, the Presque Isle Community Garden will be hosting a “spring fling” volunteer event and barbecue.
It’ll be an opportunity for residents of the housing authority neighborhood and people elsewhere in Presque Isle to sign up to rent a plot, lend some help or learn about opportunities through the season, said Christa Galipeau, who’s been leading the garden project with the 4-H Club.
The community garden started last year as a way to offer families and individuals living in the subsidized housing a chance to grow some of their own food with some guidance. “It can be a little daunting if you’ve never gardened before,” Galipeau said last year.
Four-foot by 8-foot garden plots are free for residents of the Presque Isle Housing Authority and available at $20 per plot for the members of public. The 4-H Club also grows several plots of crops they’ll donate to the Maine Harvest for Hunger.
This year, the garden is starting with a number of initiatives. They now have a garden shed and are set to plant 10 new apple trees. Galipeau said she’s hoping to plant one large, cold-hardy full-size tree in the former railway turnabout along the pedestrian path near Howard Place, a small group of subsidized homes for people age 62 and older.
Overall, Galipeau said the community garden project is helping engage multiple generations in the benefits of growing food.
A recent study from the United Kingdom, which Galipeau shared with the community garden’s Facebook followers, found that people who spend time gardening in community plots — what the English call “allotment gardens” — tend to enjoy pretty good mental and physical health.
In the study, published in the Oxford Journal of Public Health, a group of people who spent at least 30 minutes a week in a community garden had lower body mass indexes and reported less stress and higher self-esteem than a group who did not garden. A previous experimental study by Dutch researchers found that gardening can “promote relief from acute stress” by reducing the body’s production of the stress hormone cortisol.
