NorthWest Crossing Community GardenKarin Boone, of Bend, waters one of her two boxes at the Northwest Crossing community garden in Bend a few years ago.

Cheryl Howard has a rather busy couple weeks ahead of her.

The excitement starts this morning when Howard and a group of volunteers will fill two dozen raised beds at the Franklin’s Corner Community Garden in northeast Bend with soil so they can be planted.

She also has to plant fescue around the edges of the garden to keep it from losing water, meet with a Bend Park & Recreation District crew that will install a bench at the garden, and help another maintenance crew put a bike rack on the site.

“It’s just a little detail work that needs to be done at this point,” said Howard, who has spent more than three years working to get the community garden off the ground. “Our goal is to have these beds ready to rock and roll by mid-May.”

Community garden organizers like Howard start their work long before the last bit of snow melts from the top of Black Butte, the traditional local sign that it is safe to start planting Central Oregon gardens.

Long before Howard could even dream of setting a date for her garden’s opening day celebration — an event the Hollinshead and Northwest Crossing Community Gardens are celebrating today — she and her fellow volunteers had to contend with a gas main that was buried right under where she wanted to install her garden beds and a tall ponderosa pine that threatened to fall on the garden.

Though recently they got some help.

Earlier this month, the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council’s Cultivating Local Food Project announced it was giving Franklin’s Corner a $2,000 grant to buy the dirt needed to fill its 24 raised beds, provided its members agreed to donate any excess food they produced to NeighborImpact or another food pantry. The project — a joint effort between COIC and the Meyer Memorial Trust — also gave grants to five other community gardens in Central Oregon including:

• The Central Oregon Community College Collaborative Garden in Bend, which received $1,998 to purchase gardening supplies, soil, plant starts, and other materials and equipment

• The Kansas Avenue Learning Garden in Bend, which received $2,000 to improve its greenhouse infrastructure, purchase gardening supplies and print signs

• The Ward Park Community Garden in Prineville, which received $2,000 to build raised beds with cold frames so it can start vegetables earlier in the season;

• The Plainview Community Garden in Tumalo, which received $2,000 so it can rebuild raised beds that were destroyed in a snowstorm

• The Peaceful Spirit Community Garden in Warm Springs, which received $2,000 to purchase equipment for a watering system, raised beds, fences, soil and other supplies.

These grant recipients make up only a third of the 18 community gardens that will up and running in Central Oregon during this year’s growing season. That list is ever growing and includes three brand new gardens — Franklin’s Crossing, the COCC garden and the Miller’s Landing Community Garden in Bend — that are getting their start this year.