If you’ve been at the Washington Street Educational complex this week, perhaps you’ve seen the progression of the Chelsea Area Senior Center’s new hoop house inside the intergenerational garden.
On Monday, the project got underway through the efforts of the Eisenhower Center’s Moriah Enrichment Center in Manchester, which provides vocational training for individuals with post-acute traumatic brain injuries.
Jeremy Hodges, production coordinator, said “in collaboration with St. Joe’s Mercy Hospital,” he designed and oversaw the building of the first fully handicapped accessible hoop house for gardening therapy at the Superior Township hospital.
“I talked to Trinh (Pifer, executive director) about it and she said the senior center had a grant (from the Chelsea-Area Wellness Foundation) to build a hoop house here,” he said Wednesday afternoon at the site.
Although the original Eisenhower Center building is in Ann Arbor, recently, a second site was opened in Manchester on a 45-acre hobby farm, which provides clients with an opportunity to learn a variety of vocational skills.
Hodges said he purchased the hoop house kit and seven clients from the Manchester facility have worked on it for three days. On Friday, they expect to stretch the plastic cover over the metal base they’ve erected.
Hodges says the hoop house is 24 by 36 and will have a number of raised beds inside.
“It will be the second fully handicapped accessible hoop house,” in the area, and once completed, clients from the Manchester facility will build a similar one there.
When asked what will be planted in the hoop house, Jim Randolph, chairman of the senior center board said “Something that has a 100-percent germination rate. I want green plants in March.”
He said that they plan to plant in February, once the raised beds are in place and filled with soil.
Planned are fabricated cedar-plank raised beds that will be more than 20 inches high. They will have “a steel screening and landscape fabric barrier along the bottom in an attempt to eliminate the perennial weed problem,” he said.
For more information about the Eisenhower Center, click here.
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