Jennifer Bonebreak and her husband Bob work together to weed their patch of corn planted in the communal garden at Lafayette Pioneer Mobile Home Park.

Marcus Larson/News-Register

LAFAYETTE - To 11-year-old Bryce Anderson, the communal vegetable garden his family is participating in at the Lafayette mobile home park is an exciting adventure - and maybe grounds for a new business.

"I'm going to try to sell lemonade," he said.

Mostly, though, Bryce has discovered that he just really enjoys gardening.

Along with his parents, Bryce has been taking his turn working to grow the family's food, which now is harvested at home, instead of being bought packaged from the grocery store.

A half-dozen or so families in Lafayette's Pioneer Mobile Home Park are cooperating to cultivate a communal garden this summer. Each has an assigned task - watering, weeding, fertilizing, and so on - with the vegetables grown in common, rather than in individual plots. Every Thursday night, the entire group gathers to plan, work, and to harvest anything that's ready.

"It's cool," Bryce said. "We get to eat some of it."

His mother, Laurie Anderson, said the family had been doing some small-scale gardening at home already.

"Not huge amounts, but we plant a few things - herbs, tomatoes, garlic," she said.

When the family received a flier from park manager Marie Sproul, suggesting that park residents start a larger communal garden in the open space near Highway 99W, they loved the idea, Anderson said.

Home vegetable gardening has been gaining popularity nationwide in the last year, in part due to rising food and living costs, and job losses.

"I was thinking, you know, due to the economy and stuff, the garden might help out the people," Sproul said. "The lots here don't have a lot of room for a garden. ... Maybe with the way the economy is hitting people in Yamhill County, it might help some people in the park out. A lot of people supplement with little raised beds in the back yard, but this gives us a bigger area to grow vegetables."

Several families joined in, and the garden is growing corn, cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, radishes, green onions, lettuce, red onions, garlic, white onions, beans, potatoes and broccoli.

"We got some fresh broccoli from a friend, and I told my husband, 'after that, there's no going back,'" Anderson said.

The group decided together which vegetables they wanted to grow.

"In our meetings we sat down and talked about what vegetables everyone would want, ones that are common in the store, like tomatoes and stuff like that, so that's what we decided to plant," Sproul said.

No one in the group had been involved in a community garden before, Sproul said, "so we're kind of making up the rules as we go. So if we have a problem, we all just jump in and work on it and solve it and move on."

Anderson said she's thoroughly enjoying the fresh flavors.

"The fresh vegetables taste so different," she said.

Bryce agreed. "The ones in stores taste kind of weird," he said.