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Sister Holly Signing On

by Blue Peetz

Special to the Green Pages

Greetings local gardeners, friends, and steady, community stewards! From all of us here at the Sister Holly Garden Project, these last, wondrous weeks of August have afforded us an opportunity to finally check in to the
Pages with a few tales of our summer's development and a future of tremendous promise and creativity. For those unfamiliar with our work, the Sister Holly Community Garden, established two years ago, is a non-profit public garden swimming in an ocean of diverse offerings for everyone in our community. It's a place for 1) interested gardening folks, often lacking needed garden space of their own, to find and tend plots at a historically beautiful West Olympia site, 2) the organic production of diverse vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers for the vast health benefits of our volunteers and the Olympia Food Bank (over the spring and summer we have donated over 40 pounds a week to our local food bank), 3) children from the Olympia School District and YMCA Summer Camps, teenagers, college students, seniors, and everyone in between to come together and actively learn traditional skills (agriculture, carpentry, landscape design, education, etc.) and an array of disciplines (botany, soil chemistry, entomology, etc.) in a safe, empowering environment-you can always feel free to come on out and just "hang out" with our always-engaging gardening folks. Due to the tremendous efforts of all of our participants, we have enjoyed a most "fruitful" year in regards to the pursuit of these assorted goals.

Since the beginning of the Spring, the cultivated areas at our two acre home have doubled in size; we now have more than 3400 square feet overloaded in plantlife and pampered organic soil. Yet, there is still room to expand, so for interested winter gardeners right now is an excellent time to sign up for a garden plot. There is no service fee involved, we have an assortment of winter-hardy vegetable starts in need of a good home, plenty of compost and fertilizer, and lots of well-used communal tools - you just need to bring a consistent self to make it all work!

As for our future, we have just created a tremendous partnership with the Providence St. Francis Association, a newly developing non-profit assisted-living facility for senior citizens located around the corner of St. Peters Hospital, in the development of a dynamic horticultural therapy program to begin this fall. With the collective power of our project coordinators, participating seniors, and teenage volunteers from Community Youth Services and the Olympia Parks Department, the direct benefits for all involved could be quite significant. Furthermore, the impact such an undertaking could provide for our entire community, even the health-care community, could be of similar strength. Needless to say, such a project will demand diverse and creative input in both the planning and constructive stages if success bestows the ultimate of goals. For anyone interested in this project please feel free to call us at 352-1021 or stop by our original Sister Holly on 2016 Elliot Avenue. You probably won't miss our sign and we always love new visitors! Peace out, Olympia!

Blue Peetz is the founder of the Sister Holly Community Garden.

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