When Kathy Kennerly woke up on the morning of her 67th birthday this past September, she knew she wanted to spend her day immersed in nature. Her spot of choice? The Grant Community Garden.

A self-proclaimed “enthusiastic outdoors person,” Kennerly says the community garden allows her to be “creative and outdoors with a purpose.”

Kennerly lives in a high-rise apartment in the Grant community. With only a patio as her personal outside space, she has no place to create a sustainable garden. But with the new garden located conveniently at the high school, she can now do what she couldn’t do at her own home.

“Community gardens have become increasingly popular in Southeast and Northeast Portland,” says Laura Niemi, the program coordinator at Portland Community Gardens. “They bring together people from different places that all have a passion for the same thing.”

In January 2011, Leah Haykin was a junior at Grant when she came up with the idea of building a garden. She wanted a learning garden for students and another garden to share with others in the community. When Haykin attended a Portland Public School conservation meeting and heard about community gardens, she decided the time was right to make one. After all, the garden easily would be successful because sustainability has gained such momentum in Portland.

It was a daunting task that almost didn’t get completed. After the initial idea, Haykin emailed a proposal for the garden to the District administration. In return, the Environmental Club received a list of requirements so long that, as Haykin explains, “sort of felt like rejection.”

Knowing that the lack of money was a huge red flag in the administrators’ eyes, Haykin and others in the club enlisted Brick Street, a science teacher, and Madeline Kokes, the coordinator at the College and Career Center, for help. Together, they wrote a grant for $50,000. They weren’t sure if they would get it because they had been rejected for grants before.

They got the grant and things started to move. For the 2011-2012 school year, Grant added a sustainable agriculture leadership class to allow students to devote more time to the planning of the garden. Led by Street, students plowed ahead with their project.

They chose a space for the garden that had enough sunlight and was easily accessible. They worked with an architect from Otis Construction to carefully plan the layout of plots, and they added a place for Oregon native plants and raised beds for people who are handicapped.

As Street says: “These kids thought of everything.”

After sending design ideas back and forth for a while, the

members of the Sustainable Agriculture Leadership class took

their planning to the public, working closely with the neighbors in the Grant community.

During the winter of 2011 visible changes began to take place.

First, the construction workers from Otis came in and marked where the plots would be. Then the raised beds were put in along with a high-tech watering system.

Neighbors attended work days at the garden and would shovel gravel and sand into beds. Student volunteers pitched in. The garden was ready for its opening ceremony in June.

For $21 a year, local residents purchased a 10-foot by 10-foot piece of land where they could plant whatever they wanted.

What was a cordoned off area in the front of Grant during the spring has today turned into a blossoming community for gardeners, students and neighbors. The learning garden is 1,400 square feet with 11 plots. It provides a “real outdoor lab for kids to have hands on experience in a garden,” says Street, who is already planning to use the new garden in his curriculum.

It is filled with luscious vegetables, sunflowers and herbs, and the garden has caught the eyes of many. Whether they live in the neighborhood or have heard about it from others, Street says the garden “brings people to Grant for something other than an athletic event.”

Kennerly loves the atmosphere that is embedded within the community garden. “It’s a beautiful place to meet new people,” she says. “I come here and learn tricks of the trade, and in turn I share my gardening knowledge with others.”