Sunrise Meadows Organic Gardening Association (SMORGAS)
By Kate Duff
Remember the childhood ditty, "This is the house that Jack built," this is the garden that SMORGAS built!
We started with an empty lot donated by the owners of Sunrise Meadows Mobile Home Park. It didn't look like much at first, but in our minds, we had a vision. The West Valley City Clean and Beautiful Committee donated a pallet of cinder blocks and a load of topsoil to get us going.
We've been "going" ever since. A few of the SMORGAS board members picked up the blocks and unloaded them. We used newspaper on the ground to kill the weeds, set the blocks in four-foot by eight-foot beds, and rented them out for two years. We were then able to purchase more blocks and rent out more beds and purchase more blocks and rent out more beds and… you get the idea!
You'll notice the cement blocks down in the right-hand corner (northwest), which is the foundation for the "greenhouse that Scotty, Darrell, and Ryan will build." Building the foundation of any project takes a great deal of time before much progress is evident.
You can see improvement is coming along nicely. A number of residents in the mobile home parks have donated money to the children’s garden. We put a fat blue piggy bank at the office, and residents have been feeding him their loose change and sometimes even one and five-dollar bills. The children’s garden will be our crowning glory. Watch for the pictures in a few months.
Mary has set up her own bed with a little help from her son and grandson. She laid the newspaper, shoveled soil, and planted all the plants. In addition, she saw an empty four-foot by four-foot bed and did all of the prep work in it as a donation to someone else. That is the neighborly spirit of a community garden. Mary notches “community spirit” up a few levels.
She is virtually blind and has to cover herself up completely to protect against the sun because she has skin cancer. Mary also teaches at the school for the blind.
