Woman seeks support for community garden

When Lynne Leithleiter moved into her historic apartment building along the lakefront in downtown Racine, she found the third-floor rooftop garden had gone to weeds.

Four years later, she has a thriving garden of flowers, herbs and vegetables.

Last year, her garden grew into a community project developed near the Riverbend Lofts condominium development in downtown Racine.

Leithleiter, 71, hopes a similar project could take root in Kenosha.

She’s hosting a public meeting Tuesday to discuss the possibility. Anyone is welcome to attend the meeting, which starts at 6 p.m. at Northside Library, 1500 27th Ave.

“I just hope as many as the room will hold will show up, and it will hold 75,” Leithleiter said.

Love of gardening

Leithleiter’s love of gardening goes back to her childhood.

Her grandfather became a landscaper when he moved to Racine from Denmark, and her parents cultivated the tradition in their backyard.

“My mother gardened all the time,” Leithleiter said. “My father had the vegetable garden. My mother did the flowers around the house. And we kids helped with the vegetable garden. We were the ones who watered the strawberry plants and the tomato plants.”

Leithleiter and her three sisters all have gardens.

“If we visit each other’s houses, we have to tour the garden,” she said.

These days, Leithleiter’s sisters are likely to see bursts of periwinkle blue flax, towers of lavender delphiniums and delicate pink pincushion dianthus when they visit her rooftop garden.

The garden, a 2-foot-wide raised bed that spans the 250-foot perimeter of the roof, also includes herbs, vegetables and two evergreens donated by a sister’s neighbor.

“Getting those things from friends and sources is one of the most fun things about having a garden,” Leithleiter said.

They also can be the foundation for a community garden or the basis for giving back to the community, by supplying area food pantries with fresh produce, as Leithleiter and others learned while developing their project in Racine, which started in May 2009.

Community garden

What role donations might play in a Kenosha garden will have to be decided, along with choices about the garden’s location and name.

In Racine, city officials worked with volunteers to find a location. A year into gardening, the community plot still doesn’t have an official name.

“(It’s known as) as the plots at Racine Urban Garden Network. Some people call it the Marquette Garden. Some people call it the Racine Community Garden. They haven’t reached the point where they’ve got an official name,” said Leithleiter, who is no longer involved with the project.

Guided by master gardeners, who are required to donate a certain amount of time to maintain their status, the path for Kenosha’s community garden should largely depend on the people who support it.

“There needs to be some passion involved,” Leithleiter said. “I have the passion to get the people together and get it going. And I will certainly follow up on it, but I want people from Kenosha to take care of this one.”

Volunteers needed

Some of those people could come from the local community artisans and food vendors who participate in the Kenosha Harbor Market, said Curzio Caravati, the market’s vice president.

Caravati said they support Leithleiter’s efforts to start a garden in Kenosha and hope to appoint a market board member to lead the garden initiative. That board member could help find a garden location, but also could recruit gardeners to begin planting as early as next year.

At least 20 people signed up to learn more about the project when Leithleiter presented the idea in April during an Earth Day event at Gateway Technical College in Kenosha.

She hopes more people get involved. The effort, she said, is well worth it.

“A community garden creates community,” Leithleiter said. “And at this point in time with our country, when people are having problems even putting food on the table, planting a garden is one way to not only alleviate the stress of having enough food, but also make friends and create a community around a garden.”