Oh, how their garden grows
Shared Harvest Community Garden board member Felicia Echeverria rinses kale, cabbage, beets and other veggies in a garden trough Tuesday morning as she and others prepare produce to be donated to a local food kitchen. Shared Harvest's largest benefit event, Dinner Under the Stars, is Aug. 19. Tickets are now on sale.
DEVIN WEEKS/Press
Plot coordinator Michael Lee on Tuesday morning plucks cherry tomatoes from his Shared Harvest Community Garden plot to be donated to Father Bill's Kitchen.
A honeybee enjoys a stop at a magenta cosmo Tuesday morning in the Shared Harvest Community Garden in Coeur d'Alene.
Shared Harvest Community Garden at 1009 E. Foster Ave., Coeur d'Alene will be illuminated with thousands of lights for the annual Dinner Under the Stars event Aug. 19.
COEUR d'ALENE — A honeybee landed in a magenta cosmo in the late Tuesday morning sunlight and busily went about its pollen-collecting bee business.
Activity buzzed around the bees, hummingbirds and other critters in the Shared Harvest Community Garden at 1009 E. Foster Ave. in Coeur d'Alene as volunteers and gardeners plucked produce, pulled weeds and watered greenery.
"Besides growing food, our main goal is to build community so people get a chance to be part of a community,” said Michael Lee, Shared Harvest plot coordinator. "We welcome everybody in the area to be part of the garden community. Even if they don’t garden, we have picnic tables, we have shade, you’ll see parents with their kids come and just let their kids play in the garden."
Bursting with tomatoes, sunflowers, chives, cucumbers, squash and much more in its 47 plots, nonprofit Shared Harvest celebrates 15 years this season.
"We're all here because we love the garden," said Jodi Foutch, Shared Harvest board president. "We would love to see the garden here forever, for other people in the future. That's part of the reason we're working here."
She said the land beneath the garden belongs to private owners, but Shared Harvest hopes to purchase it in the near future.
"They're generous to let us use this land for 15 years — it's so generous," Foutch said. "We want to buy the land: It's just a matter of raising the funds."
Felicia Echeverria, who has a farm in Costa Rica and lives in Coeur d'Alene, knelt at a water trough as she rinsed fresh produce to be donated to local food kitchens.
"I am totally loving it," she said. "It's just great. This garden is very productive."
Tickets are on sale for Shared Harvest's annual "Dinner Under the Stars" benefit event, held in the garden 5:30-9:30 p.m. Aug. 19.
“It is our main source of funding,” Lee said. “We pay the property tax and the water and the electricity and we have to buy tools and things like that.”
Round tables that seat eight will fill the atmospherically illuminated garden.
"Dinner Under the Stars," it's so magical," Foutch said.
She said Avista helped the garden enhance lighting and a team from The Coeur d'Alene Resort will install strings of lights.
"Tens of thousands of lights will be in the trees," Foutch said. "It starts at 5:30, and it's light out and warm, and then it starts to gently cool down and gets darker and the trees light up."
Collective Kitchen will cater and the evening will include dinner, drinks, live music, auctions and plenty of time for socializing.
Tickets are $50 each or $400 for a table of eight, on sale at:
• Fifth Street Farmers' Market, Shared Harvest booth.
• Kootenai County Farmers’ Market in Riverstone, Shared Harvest booth.
• Shared Harvest Community Garden on Tuesdays, 8 a.m. to noon.
Info: sharedharvestgarden.org
