Generous Garden

MOSES LAKE — Don Key is always busy with something.

“I’ve always got projects,” he said as he stood in the vacant lot next to his house on West Basin Street.

It’s a vacant lot Key said he bought some years ago after the owner died. Key turned it into a garden, which in late summer was filled with purple tomatoes ripening to red on trellised vines, Armenian cucumbers curling low and hanging heavy, rhubarb growing leafy and tall, and melon vines wrapped around the chain link fence enclosing the garden.

While he keeps some of the produce for himself, and allows neighbors who need some to pick what they like, Key said he really grows this produce for the Moses Lake Food Bank.

Key crouched to pluck a long Armenian cucumber, which he says is actually a variety of Chinese melon.

“This cucumber, I’ve grown for a number of years,” he said. “If I’m growing for the food bank, let’s make it a big one. You can have one cucumber to feed a family.”

“Don started this garden, and he brought staples to us,” said Peny Archer, operations manager with Community Services of Moses Lake, the organization that runs the food bank. “It’s very fresh. Garden fresh.”

She said much of what Key brings in are basics like tomatoes and rhubarb, though one year he donated sugar cane.

“The kids liked to use those as swords,” she said.

“I think it’s kind of nice,” Key said. “I’ve got a little arrangement where the guy who picks up the day-old bread on the weekend, I’ll call him Saturday morning or Sunday morning, and fresh off the vine it goes into the fridge and (food bank clients) get this organic, non-GMO produce.”

Key, 63, currently teaches at Columbia Basin Job Corps, though he taught math for many years at SkillSource, a state agency that helps adults get the training they need to get gainfully employed or find better work. But he’s also built homes and served on the board of the local Habitat for Humanity, is a skilled mushroom hunter who enjoys teaching others how to find edible mushrooms, and leads students into the wilderness for camping trips to help them learn what they are made of.

“I’m a late bloomer. I was 30 before I decided to go to college,” Key said. “I had dreams. I was going to go to Wenatchee, my old home, I was going to get married, have two, three kids, and teach junior high school social studies. But the man upstairs had different plans for me.”

Those different plans included living in a trailer near Warden, trading his labor for rent, while he taught part-time. Eventually, Key said, he became involved with Habitat for Humanity, building houses near the base, when one of their community garden projects in the Larson Community fell into disuse. Key said Habitat planned to build a house on the lot, so he rescued the bumpers used to separate the garden plots and started his garden right next door to his home.

“I made an arrangement with Peny at the food bank,” he said. “And this is year 10.”

As a teacher, Key said, he focuses on teaching math in such a way that students will understand how useful it is in their daily lives. In fact, he said, he’s developed an applied academic program, a hands-on math class for students learning trades.

“Everything I try to do is about how it’s going to be relevant in your life,” he said. “You need to know percentages so you can figure out your paycheck. Are you getting a good deal at Walmart?”

Key said the freedom of teaching gives him the time and ability to do these other things — grow vegetables, help build homes and give something back to a community he clearly has gained much from in the last three decades.

In fact, Key said, he’s currently trying to find some farmers willing and able to donate pumpkins so school children can decorate them and then get them donated to the food bank in time for Halloween.

“We need to get that rolling,” he said. “I've always felt that I got to be part of something bigger than myself.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.