What started off as a project to bring the community together now lays in ruin.
Four years ago, The Communicator covered the creation of Spokane Falls Community College’s very own community garden. To quote ‘SFCC TO BUILD COMMUNITY GARDEN’ written by Jay DeLeo, “A new community garden on campus promises a better sense of community, hope, and the ability to feed faculty and students alike.” Since that issue, it’s fair to say that things didn’t turn out so great.
If you’re ever walking past the technical arts and campus security buildings on your way to the stadium, be sure to take a look to your left. Do you see that fenced off area with the two nearly dead trees, the three-foot-tall grass, the dead vegetation, the rusted gardening tools, and sunken-in greenhouse? That’s the ghastly remains of SFCC’s Community Garden, what’s left of it anyway.
Questions rose to the surface upon looking into the garden. The first of which is the most obvious, ‘What happened to the garden?’ How did these things come to be?
“I don’t know anything about what happened,” said student Brittney Concepcion, on a post on the SFCC phone app, “but if you’d like some help cleaning it up and getting it ready for spring, I’d be more than happy to help.”
“While I helped get the garden started, I really have no idea what led to it being abandoned,” said Bradley Bleck, English Department. “My guess is that while I think someone tried to start a club around the garden, it just never took, and little by little, things fell by the wayside.”
“The community garden was a student-driven project,” said Heather McKenzie, Director of Student Funded Projects. “Sadly, the interest in the garden has gone away.”
It would seem that the answer to that first question is simply that students had just lost interest in the garden. Though the project had a strong beginning, interest in the garden had seemed to fade in the almost four years since its construction.
This brings the second question: What’s next? Establishing that the project has pretty much been abandoned, what is to become of the lot? Are there plans for it, or is the lot just to stay there as a reminder of better days?
“It needs a home,” said Bleck, “such as with the food pantry or an established club that wants to use it to further their club goals.”
“The plan was to turn this space into a meditation/serenity space,” said McKenzie. “The hope was to add low maintenance greenery and couple benches and a nice space for student, faculty, and staff to sit and study or read or just enjoy a little quiet space.”
Do you agree with this plan? Do you think that the garden can be saved? Let us know what you think via the SFCC phone app and by commenting on this article on The Communicator’s website.