FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTUU/KTVF) – The Stone Soup Cafe’s community garden in Fairbanks is expanding with new plants including trees, thanks to funds made available courtesy a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant.
The community garden has flourished, as the Stone Soup Cafe’s expansion this fall included planting food-bearing perennials like cherry and apple trees.
“For most plants, you plant them in the spring, but for trees and berries and a lot of other things, even like garlic, you plant them in the fall,” explained Peter Miller, the garden manager for Stone Soup Cafe.
Currently the garden consists of mostly annuals, or plants that last just one season. But after receiving a three-year urban food forest grant from the USDA, focus has shifted to expanding the garden with perennials, or plants that live through the winter and produce food year-after-year.
Other community-based organizations have aided in the effort to make the garden expansion possible.
“We built these [garden] beds with the Folk School and got dirt and compost donated, compost from Boreal Woods Mushroom Farm, the topsoils from Great Northwest, and we got potting soil from Risse Greenhouse,” Miller said.
“It’s been a big community effort to grow more food downtown.”
With the trees expected to bear fruit in just a few years, Miller said the additional food will provide for the soup kitchen but will also be available to the general public in Fairbanks.
“It’s mostly just picked straight out of the garden from people who need food or are hungry,” he explained.
Despite the chosen perennials being adapted for colder weather, Miller said he will take extra measures to protect the young trees for the winter.
“I will probably wrap them up to protect them from moose,” he said. “In the wintertime, when there’s a little less food around, I think they might be more likely to come eat these fruit trees.”
The expansion isn’t stopping with the newly planted perennials. Miller said a few more empty garden beds will soon be filled as well.
Miller said that this week, a group of middle school students will visit the garden.
“I’m going to try to put their youthful energy to work, shovel a bunch more dirt into these beds and get more planted,” Miller said.
“Whatever we don’t plant this fall, we’ll try to get going next spring.”
The new additions to the garden include apples, plums, saskatoons, honey berries, currants, strawberries, cherries, chives and horseradish.
The Stone Soup Group’s community garden is located on a half-acre lot, at Lacey Street and Eleventh Avenue.
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