Cordata Community Garden

“Everybody is just winging it within what they know about gardening,” Bob Hendricks, master
composter at Cordata Community Garden, said.

Bob Hendricks, the garden’s master composter, surveys the garden as he discuses the implications of increasingly warmer springs.

Hendricks said that the warm weather is uncharted territory, and they are doing their best to take advantage of it.

Gary Borton, the lead garden coordinator, said that the main effect they are seeing on the garden is how quickly everything is growing this year.

February 2015 was the warmest on record, according to the National Weather Service. The average temperature throughout the month was 47 degrees, beating out 1991’s record of 46.3.

Hendricks jokingly accused Bellingham of skipping winter all together.

“I wasn’t even wearing my winter clothes for most of the time,” he said.

The high temperatures have jump started this year’s growing cycle at the garden.

Roughly 70 work to garden the 50 raised beds in the quarter acre community garden nestled behind a neighborhood development.

Hendricks said they are responding to the weather with a variety of new strategies. They brought in compost early and began planting as soon as possible.

“We’ve basically taken better advantage of the warmer weather. And that’s a gamble, but people are willing to take that gamble for the experience,” Hendricks said.

Sharon Pelfrey, longtime member at the garden said that she hopes the early start will allow her to put in a second crop around August.

Early sprouts in a round bed dedicated to the local women’s shelter. A good year for the garden would mean more produce for the shelter.

Pelfrey grows a wide variety of vegetables in her 16 foot raised bed, from squash and lettuce to carrots and leeks.

She said that she can probably fit in an extra crop of lettuce, and if the warm weather lasts into October she might get a second round of squash as well.

Aside from her own bed, Pelfrey also tends a bed of vegetables which are donated straight to the Womancare Shelter in Cordata.

A second crop would be good not just for her, but for the shelter as well. Last year the garden donated 97 pounds of produce to the shelter and the extended growing period might mean a significant increase in that amount.

Pelfrey said that raising her own food was important to her because she knows what goes onto the plants and into the soil.

She said that that was one of the reasons she decided to start working with the shelter. She figured that since she loved gardening so much she might as well help others while she was doing it.

Excess produce from the garden is also donated to the local food bank. Borton estimates that they donated upwards of 1,000 pounds of left over food last year alone.

A good year for the garden would mean an increase of produce to donate Pelfrey said.

In the meantime, the members of the Cordata Community Garden will continue to experiment with the way that gardening will look in an increasingly warmer world.

The garden has one communal herb bed which all gardeners maintain. Bright chive sprouts wave in the wind as a sign over the entrance to the garden proclaims “Go in Peace.”