St. Mark Community Garden was established in 2010. It is a tranquil yet busy, dusty and sometimes dirty, fun and rewarding, beautiful and weedy acre of land behind our church. When spring is cold and wet it can feel like it takes forever for crops to start growing and the weeds take off WAY BEFORE…
Many people have been working diligently in the St. Mark Community Garden harvesting fresh produce to be donated to the Thurston County Food Bank. These recent pictures show just some of the bountiful results of the hard work and love put in to tending our community garden. Click on the images to enlarge.
“If you want a child’s mind to grow, you must first plant a seed.” The following was written by our St. Mark Office Administrator, Vicki Labensky. This year, members of the Thurston County Food Bank School Gardens AmeriCorps asked the fifth graders at Mountain View Elementary School to reflect on their visits to our St.…
The pictures with this article are of last summer during harvest time. As you can see, many volunteers work in the garden to make it a success! Potatoes, carrots, and tomatoes are our largest crops but cabbage, squash, celery, broccoli, corn, and cucumbers are also grown and provide a wide variety of fresh produce for…
These photos are just a small taste of the produce that has been delivered from our St. Mark Garden to the Lacey and Olympia Food Banks this year. 10,000 pounds and counting. Click on images to enlarge.
The St. Mark 2023 Community Garden was started 1/16/2023. The first row of garlic is in the ground. Only a few more rows to do! Head Gardener, Gary Delozier (shown here), reported the 2022 total produce donated weighed in at 11,371 pounds…down a bit due to a cold, wet spring. The garden was fortified with…
On Thursday, October 6, students from five 1st grade classes (almost 100 children total) from Mountain View Elementary School visited our Community Garden to learn about pumpkins. Once the learning was done, it was snack time. Jenny Bona and Earla Ferry gave them each a little dish of Goldfish crackers, carrots, pepitas (which means little…
Thanks to a Thrivent Grant received for our St. Mark Community Garden, we now have a new section called a “pollinator garden”. This garden was designed and planted with specific nectar and pollen producing plants that will attract certain insects known as “pollinators”. Both plants and seeds were planted, including milkweed plants for Monarch butterflies. This…
After 2 years of pandemic isolation, St. Mark Community Garden held its annual Potato Planting event. 1000 row-feet of potatoes are grown each year for the Thurston County Food Bank. Over thirty people, large and small showed up for some gardening, some visiting, some refreshments, and some joy. Please enjoy the pictures from the predicted…
Calling all Volunteers!! Saturday April 2nd we will plant 200 pounds of seed potatoes in the St. Mark Community Garden. This has been an annual event since 2011 but the last two years the pandemic prevented us from gathering. Last Sunday, a group of members, including some darling children, planted our four pea beds. The rain…