Fruit garden in Mount Vernon may shut down

Published 9:24 am Tuesday, February 19, 2008

You may have never heard of the community fruit display garden in Mount Vernon, but if you’ve ever eaten a local apple, you’ve benefited from it.

And it soon may be gone.

The 7-acre garden, located on land owned by the Mount Vernon Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center, displays the best choices for Western Washington’s fickle fruit-growing climate. It showcases the results of 40 years of research and features new, heritage and unusual fruit trees, berries and nuts. This is the program that discovered what locals ought to grow when Red Delicious apples and Bing cherries failed.

Supporters say if $55,000 isn’t raised by the end of March, hundreds of trees may have to be destroyed and the garden shut down. That would end decades of work and harm small area commercial growers and thousands of home gardeners, they say. It also could hamper local growers’ ability to keep farming area land.

“People don’t realize that Western Washington is way ahead of the rest of the country on knowing what will do well here,” said Sam Benowitz, vice president of the volunteer group that maintains the garden, the Western Washington Fruit Research Foundation.

The foundation is asking for the public for donations, and at least one anonymous member has pledged to match donations up to $27,000. The group is made up primarily of dedicated local home growers.

Why is the garden suddenly without enough money? The answer is complex, but hinges on a decision by Washington State University, which operates the research center, to stop allowing one of their paid technicians to help care for the plants in the display garden, Benowitz said. Another part-time position was lost when grant money ran out, he said, and a person who coordinated volunteers stepped down.

Debra Inglis, the interim director at the center, said WSU doesn’t have the personnel to care for plants in a volunteer garden, and this has been the agreement from the beginning.

“(The foundation’s) use of WSU property for their volunteer display garden is guided by memorandum of understanding signed in 2004 between WSU and (the foundation),” she said.

Generally, university researchers find the money to pay for their projects, and that money usually comes from commercial entities, said Kristan Johnson, president of the volunteer group. Commodities with a lot of commercial support, such as wine grapes, get lots of study. However, commercial fruit-growing in Western Washington is done on a much smaller scale.

The Washington State Apple Commission primarily funds research for varieties that grow on the east side of the mountains, where the apple industry is centered, Benowitz said. And while volunteers put in more than a thousands hours each year maintaining the fruit display garden, it still needs a paid person to coordinate the operations of the garden, he said. The money they hope to raise would pay for a qualified person.

The loss of the garden would be a blow, too, for local farmers who could benefit from new and unusual varieties that could be sold at a premium to restaurants or turned into high-value products such as hard cider.

“People feel like it’s important for our quality of life to keep farm land,” Benowitz said. “This makes it possible for them to make enough money to keep working the land.”

Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com.