By Chris Lewis | Aug. 27, 2020
Mount Pearl’s Green Team members have been busy this summer sharing garden bed knowledge and upgrading the Forest Avenue area.
The team has only two members this year, but that hasn’t stopped Jennifer Blundon and Sofia Quijada from getting things done.
Blundon, the team leader, explained that this year, the City of Mount Pearl was unsure if it would go ahead with the program because of Covid-19, but ultimately decided to take on a smaller team.
Blundon and Quijada started off teaching interested residents how they could build their own garden beds at home.
“It was a bit of a different summer, so not a ton of outdoor work was being done initially,” Blundon said. “With this, people can learn how to build their own community garden beds at home, which is great if they’re cautious about going out in public places with social distancing and everything going on.”
Currently, there are community gardens at the Gloria Pearson Community Center and one on Forest Avenue. These two groups worked alongside the Green Team, giving them insight on how to go about the first part of their project.
That ended up becoming a video that Blundon and Quijada filmed themselves, providing instructions for viewers to learn the basics of community garden bed construction. Blundon said the goal was to highlight that building a community garden bed is not a difficult task.
“You don’t even need to own a saw,” Blundon said, noting that hardware stores such as Kent can cut wood for you in the exact measurements needed, making the process significantly easier.
But there were other challenges.
“A lot of the materials had already been purchased. Like, finding soil later in the season was next to impossible,” Blundon said. “But, most years it’s usually a pretty simple process.”
Although their work for this year has finished, Blundon said there are talks of adding to the Forest Avenue garden, with community gardens built to be more reminiscent of real gardens – crops planted and grown directly in the ground, as opposed to wooden beds. They are hoping to get some local farmhands to give them a hand, but noted that this is something they have at least a year to work out.
“The Forest Avenue area is actually pretty interesting and unique. It’s an area where houses used to be, and there’s five houses that have been removed in the last five years due to the flood zones of the Waterford Rive. Some homes are still there, but some took the opportunity to move away,” Blundon explained.
Equipped with this knowledge, the Mount Pearl Green Team began a Forest Avenue heritage project, with blog posts from parts of that project scheduled to be released in the coming weeks.
After the homes were removed, the City encouraged the building of a community garden to keep the area in good condition, and maintain an area that had been around for so long.
“We helped with some of the gardens, and the maintenance of it,” said Blundon. “We built two gardens down that way, and even did some interviews with the gardeners and got to know the community and the area. It’s a really strong, old community of families that have been there for some over 60 years. There’s a strong sense of community there.”
The garden beds can be used by the general public. Anyone interested in using them should contact City Hall.
“Once they have the go-ahead, they’re free to plant just about anything they want in these little 4x4 garden beds that are allotted to people for virtually as long as they want to have one,” Blundon said. “We’re not from Mount Pearl, but we’re from the general area so it was interesting to us to be able to get engaged, involved, and learn about the City and all the community aspects. We just finished up this week, and it really was a great experience.”
