Community garden planned for Butler

An empty acre behind the Butler Township Municipal Building could become a laboratory, a picnic spot, a place for show-and-tell, an aviary, a classroom and a food source.

In short, a community garden.

“With this economy, look at it as a way to save money and make friends,” said Krista Schneider, a Conyngham resident and founder of the Center for Landscape Design and Stewardship.

Schneider and the board members of the center are planning the garden with the Butler supervisors and the township manager.

State Rep. Todd Eachus, D-116, gave the township a grant of $10,000, which will help workers run a water line, create paths and put fencing around the garden this month.

Then in May, Schneider and others from the center will invite the community to a weekend work day to mark and prepare the garden for planting.

Schneider and township officials don’t expect to implement all their ideas this year.

In the long run, they envision the garden as a place where senior citizens will teach children to plant.

Gardeners will see displays of native plants that they can test at home.

Folks without much land at home will rent plots to grow food and flowers. They will store their tools in lockers at the garden, too.

Workers from the same company or club might plant vegetables and give the harvest to charity.

Picnickers will sit under a gazebo and watch what flies into the bird and butterfly garden that local author and butterfly expert Rick Mikula agreed to help design.

Students will start crops with their teachers and nourish them while participating in summer recreation programs or, perhaps, a summer camp that organizers would like to start at the garden.

Gardeners knowledgeable about reusing rainwater, deterring pests ecologically or composting will lead seminars for other growers.

The garden will have fruit trees, a patch for pumpkins, and crops that people don’t normally grow at home: melons, blueberries, raspberries and strawberries that will catch children’s interest.

Some flower and vegetable beds will be elevated to wheelchair height and standing height for gardeners who still want to raise crops but find it difficult to do so from a kneeling position.

At Fritzingertown Senior Living Community in Drums, residents tend their own gardens, but the community garden will be close by, too.

So, some residents might want to pass along what they’ve learned about growing things.

“I think it would be more along the lines of tutoring to mentor a novice at gardening,” Paula Sagan Hahn, Fritzingertown’s executive director, said.

Her husband, Steve Hahn, the township manager, said older people learned something that can help later generations.

“A lot of the older folks did this because it was the way they lived,” he said. “It was a source of food, and we got away from that. But it’s a good way to teach the kids about recycling and composting and growing things organically. It teaches them a different lifestyle.”

Farming has been part of Butler Township since the valley was settled 200 years ago, Hahn pointed out.

“As we’re starting to see houses and developments going on these fields, this is a way of carrying that on. Letting folks know this is important to our economy. Have them be able to work with little kids who thought you got tomatoes from Walmart,” he said.

He said the supervisors wanted to build a garden after they bought 88 acres in 2007, primarily for recreation.

They hired Barry Isett and Associates, a consulting engineering firm with an office in Hazleton, to design a master plan.

The plan being prepared might include trails, sports fields or other recreational uses for the land.

Schneider works for Barry Isett as a landscape architect, and she got further involved when Hahn mentioned the gardening idea to her.

By pitching in at the community garden, she thought she could achieve some of her center’s goals such as helping people raise their own food and teaching others the merits of native plants and natural fertilizer.

The Center for Landscape Design and Stewardship is a nonprofit without a location, but Schneider hopes to start an arboretum and education center, featuring a “green” building that will showcase construction methods that save energy.

“My center is about encouraging sustainability and being more responsible in decisions for how you’re growing food,” Schneider said.

Township Supervisor Robert Shelhamer is among the Butler residents who learned lessons at an early age from growing his own vegetables.

During World War II, he helped plant acres of victory gardens, a term that U.S. Rep. Paul Kanjorski revived on Monday.

Kanjorski, D-11, said Americans need the equivalent of victory gardens to help them feel part of the effort to bail out businesses and stimulate the national economy.