Chicks take flight to Gameti
Gameti’s community garden gets 100 baby chickens
Jessica Davey-Quantick
Northern News Services
Monday, June 27, 2016
GAMETI/RAE LAKES
Air Tindi's latest passengers were extra fluffy. One hundred baby chickens left Yellowknife on Friday, bound for Gameti.
Darla McAndie, customer services manager at Air Tindi, gets up close and personal with a chick bound for Gameti from Yellowknife. - Jessica Davey-Quantick/NNSL photo |
They're part of the on-going community garden project in Gameti. When the project started, it was a roughly 21,600 square foot garden plot. But by last summer, it had grown to over 43,000 square feet and included two plots and a greenhouse. Today, Judal Dominicata, the community's senior administrative officer, said they're up to 80,000 square feet. About two thirds of that is given over to potatoes.
"We have four varieties of potato that are being planted. And then the greenhouse, we have the corn, we have the sunflower, we have the peas, we have the lettuce, we have the hot pepper, we have the winter squash," said Dominicata.
The garden is part of Gameti's five-year community development plan, funded by the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment and the Department of Municipal and Community affairs.
The chickens will be sold to community members at a discount, to help work around high food costs. "It's for the community," said Dominicata.
"It is subsidized by the community, we give to the community people because chicken is very expensive, chicken is expensive here. So we give it to them, and then they will only pay us 50 per cent."
This isn't the first time chickens have come to Gameti. Last year, 38 chicks and four goats made the trip, to help the community reach it's self-sufficiency goal. They won't be repeating the goats however.
"We are still studying. Remember the goats? Some of them does not like goat meat. The idea there is because caribou is now becoming very scarce, so we would like to have an alternative meat, but we did not like," said Dominicata.
Instead, this year's animals will include pigs and turkeys as well as chickens.
They'll be raised as part of the garden project by the community. Seventy-five of the 100 chicks on the Friday flight will be for egg production, while 25 are destined for the dinner table
"All of the people will help me raise them, because we have the house there in the garden. So they will be scheduled, you will go there, I will monitor you, you go there and feed, you go there and clean, like that," he said. "The same method we are using in the garden and in the greenhouse."
