Aroland working to reestablish community garden

Aroland’s Mark Bell is still eating vegetables from last year’s garden.
“We’re still eating tomatoes, we’re still eating chili peppers, a little bit of carrots,” said Bell, Aroland’s economic development officer. “We’ve been able to freeze what we can and make it last.”
Bell froze a variety of vegetables last fall from his backyard garden and greenhouse, including tomatoes, onions and red and green peppers.
“We just froze them — threw them in the freezer,” Bell said. “When we wanted to eat them, we just put them in a bowl of warm water. Sometimes they got a little mushy, but they’re still cheaper than buying them in the store.”
Bell said the garden and greenhouse has saved his family “a lot of money.”
“And with my wife being a vegetarian, it has allowed us to eat very healthy,” Bell said. “It’s good.”
Bell said there is a lot of work involved with a garden, from improving the soil in the garden to putting up fences to keep out dogs and other animals.
“We use a lot of the twigs and aspen and alder to weave together to make a fence,” Bell said.
Bell is also looking forward to helping with Aroland’s community garden this year, where community members usually plant a variety of hardier vegetables, including peas, beans, carrots and potatoes.
“It’s harder to grow tomatoes and things like that because you need really solid temperatures,” Bell said. “We get some cold nights and it’s pretty hard on those types of plants. You’ve got to stick to the potatoes and carrots and peas and beans.”
Although the community didn’t plant a community garden last year, the previous year’s community garden was a success.
“We grew a lot of potatoes and onions and beets,” Bell said. “We had a couple of things that didn’t work out, like our pumpkins.”
In addition to the community garden, Bell is encouraging community members to plant their own personal gardens in their backyards. He said the band is ready to provide seeds and gardening expertise to any community member who is interested.
Bell plans to build a couple of more greenhouses in his backyard this year to grow even more vegetables for his family.
“We found a bunch of scrap wood that we used to build our greenhouses,” Bell said. “We just made a simple shell, almost like a big doghouse shell, and we wrapped it in the thickest clear plastic we could find.”
Bell usually mixes his own soil from local materials for use in the greenhouse.
“If you don’t want to buy your soil, you can go out into the forest and find a cedar swamp,” Bell said. “That’s where we’ve been finding our black earth and we also pick moss (to) make our own peat moss. It helps it absorb a lot of the moisture and holds the moisture longer.”