Riverside Community Garden

Riverside Community Garden is located by the green space at the south end of Riverside Drive NW.

The Gardens

Riverside Gardens is in a fully exposed location, subject to all the conditions that come whith Chinook Zone gardening.

There are 43 garden plots at Riverside Drive - 24 ground plots and 19 raised beds. There is also a common herb bed, communcal vegetable bed, strawberry patch, and communal pole bean patch. There is also a food forest that has apples, sour cherries, haskups, red currants, and pears.

Following is a site map.

First Season - 2015

Establishing the Riverside garden in the open turf field was a huge effort.  So many volunteers from the initial garden subscriber list showed up to help.  A good amount of time was spent installing the perimeter fence and getting bed perimeters cut and assembled. 

The construction of the garden grounds faced a big time crunch with; in ground water system, turf scraping, perimeter fence construction, bed construction, filling beds with our soil/compost mixture; all after the Spring thaw and before we got too far into the growing season.  But it was done and the first gardeners were able to prepare their personal beds and plant for June 1.  What a success!  

Riverside Gardens went from completely bare the first of June...

To this ... over the course of the first season.

Food Forest - 2016

At the Riverside site a large area was reserved for a food forest and at the start it looked pretty bare, but it was a start.

Food Forest - 2020

The food forest has undergone some incredible changes since it's original inception in 2016.  Most of the plants have gotten themselves established, but winters are harsh and a few of our plantings had some major set backs.  The romantic cherries had some degree of winter kill, and the pears and Evans cherries winter killed to snow level.   The spring of 2020 teased us with warm spell which gave them a false start signal to start growing, and was followed by a deep freeze.  The plants have started suckering though and we will hopefully be able to train new trees off these suckers.

Developing some of the perennial and annual beds this year have been started, and will continue each year.