SANDPOINT — The sun was shining Saturday morning, so a group of volunteers grabbed their sunglasses, gloves and shovels and headed to the Bonner Community Food Bank.

Eighteen volunteers installed new, raised garden beds and filled them with soil. Soon, the raised beds will be abundant with fresh produce for the food bank to send home with clients.

"I think it's great," said food bank executive director Debbie Love. "It's another step that the food bank can do to provide food for our community. We always want to provide fresh produce if we can."

Michele Murphree, Food for our Children board member, has helped put gardens in at all of the local elementary schools and is working with the Bonner County Coalition for Health to install the garden at the food bank, as well as another community garden at Early Head Start.

"It's been awesome," Murphree said. "The community has come together and I think people are really excited."

Jennifer Maddux, a Sandpoint High School junior who was recently honored with the Credit 2 Kids award for her outstanding work at school and in the community, was volunteering her Saturday morning to help fill the garden beds with soil.

Maddux said she has zero gardening experience, but thought she might pick something up while also helping out a good cause.

"People always donate to the food bank, but it's usually canned food, and who want to eat canned food every day?" Maddux said. "People who need it should have fresh vegetables and fresh fruit."

Pat VanVolkinburg of Bountiful Organics helped with the decision of what to plant this year, which includes some colorful ideas. Along with strawberries, sugar snap peas and snow peas, there will be a colorful variety of rainbow chard, carrots and potatoes.

The different colors of carrots include orange, purple, yellow, white and red; and the potatoes will be in red, white, purple and yellow.

Murphree said when the kids at the school plant the different colored potatoes, it is like a treasure hunt when it comes time for the fall harvest.

"So that is going to be so much fun when we harvest potatoes," Murphree said.

Nanci Jenkins with the Bonner County Coalition for Health, which started in March, 2016, said she was hired by Panhandle Health to implement a grant funded by the Center for Disease Control. The task of the grant, she said, was to improve access to healthy food in Bonner County and to improve clinical and community linkages.

"So we started the coalition just to get people together to figure out, 'what does that mean? What does that look like?'" Jenkins said. "With the help of the group, we did a needs assessment to look at what was happening in the community and what was missing. From that, we developed a community action plan."

The larger coalition broke off into smaller groups, she said, based on what the members were interested in working on. One group worked on improving access to food through a Change for Change program at the grocery store and community gardens. Around the first of the year, Jenkins said the group realized they needed to get a jump on the gardens because summer would be upon them and gone before they knew it.

So the group met with Perky Hagadone at Northside Elementary, where a successful garden was already underway, as well as several other individuals, including Murphree.

"(Murphree) basically started connecting all the dots together and the outcome of that is this garden here," Jenkins said.

The coalition rented some of the city plots at Sandpoint Community Garden as well for use by community members and the food bank. In addition, Jenkins said, the coalition purchased several Earthboxes, which are self-watering, self-sustainable and easily movable planting systems. The Earthboxes are going to the Sandpoint senior center, Sandpoint Area Seniors, Inc. For those who would like to learn more about Earthboxes, a demonstration will be held at SASi at 2 p.m. May 17.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.