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Old Posted Jun 21, 2010, 1:45 AM
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At Hillsboro's Intel, the community garden is a company perk with a purpose


June 18, 2010

Katy Muldoon



Read More: http://blog.oregonlive.com/pdxgreen/...he_commun.html

Quote:
Tomatoes climb toward the sky. Spinach bolts over raised-bed walls. Podding radishes, already 4 feet tall, boast peppery seed pods bound for the salad bowl. All of it grows in an unlikely spot -- at the edge of a sprawling parking lot on Intel's Jones Farm campus. The 32,000-square-foot employee community garden, its 81 beds planted for the first time this spring, joins a handful of plots nationwide outside such companies as PepsiCo, Toyota and Aveda. Employees plant, weed and putter before work and after, during lunch breaks and on weekends.

Think of company gardens as perks with a purpose. "Happy employees are productive employees," says Dave Karlson, site manager at Google's data center in The Dalles, where workers have tilled, seeded and harvested a small communal plot for several years. "Gardening is a great way people can get away from their desk for a few minutes and check on their tomatoes." Intel employees thought so, too. About a year ago, several suggested that the technology company allow them to transform a weedy swath into an organic vegetable garden.

The notion fit nicely into Intel's Great Place to Work program, which offers everything from on-site dry cleaning and free coffee to college scholarships and reimbursement for adoption-related expenses. The program's goal, says Bill MacKenzie, communications manager: "Make employees feel happy and appreciated." In Hillsboro last week, as charcoal clouds raced across the sky at the end of a work day, Jeanie Jarvis looked, at the very least, content.

She drove the few miles to the garden from Intel's Ronler Acres campus, where she works as a buyer. Dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and polka-dot rubber boots, Jarvis pulled on gloves, grabbed a bucket and got to work. Dodging raindrops and sun, she inspected the eggplant and edamame beans she'd planted, and yanked weeds from around a 20-foot-by-20-foot raised bed she gardens with co-worker Sara Running.

Despite a spring so soggy it turned typically uncomplaining gardeners into whiners, the paths between Intel's beds were mud-free. Maybe it's just good drainage, or maybe it's because the company garden was planned, plotted and planted with the sort of precision you might expect from folks who build intricate microprocessors.



Jeanie Jarvis works at Intel, but is also a master gardener and helped initiate the garden at the Jones Farm plant.

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