Spring Training - Community Garden Style

In baseball, teams take a winter break. Then, in early February, busses ferry supplies to Florida or Arizona. Pitchers and catchers come back. Then, the team reunites and the old guard gets to look over the crop of rookies. In late March, the regular season begins.

Amazingly, much the same happens in community vegetable gardens, or at least at the Medfield Community Garden I have overseen for the (gulp) past 15 years in Boston’s southwest suburbs.

Back at the end of October, the garden shut down for the winter. On November 1, I sent an email to all ‘gardeners in good standing’ asking if they wanted to return for the 2025 season. Once I had those results in hand, I put my feet up for a few months. Except I didn’t. That November email also asked gardeners what went right and what went wrong over the course of the season. I mostly focused on the ‘where we screwed up’ responses and figured out ways to address them, just like any good team manager.

Public enemy Number One

This past season, what was on everyone’s mind were “critters” digging under or chewing through fences, and the stronger fences everyone was putting up to keep the critters out. The complaint, though, was the hard work of taking down those fences in the fall, only to have to re-install them five months later. To save the three days of work at the beginning and end of the season, could the fences stay up?

Putting up and taking down fences every
season was the chief complaint

That’s what I did over the winter break: devised a rationale that would get the approval of the Baseball Commission – er, the Medfield Conservation Commission. Last evening, the Commission voted to try a ‘fences-stay-up’ experiment for the winter of 2025-2026. I don’t expect anyone to offer to carry me into the garden on their shoulders. More like I’ll get a bucket of Gatorade dumped over me,

I try to make everyone happy. It isn't easy.

On January 1, I emailed returning gardeners asking if they really plan to come back and, if so, do they want to stay in the same size plot and same location. A surprising number of respondents wanted a change. Seven gardeners with half plots were ready to move up to full ones (from 300 to 600 square feet). One gardener elected to downsize. Them I sent around the plot plan to those returning gardeners showing the plots that would be available to new gardeners. Half a dozen gardeners ask to be switched to greener pastures (or richer soil, maybe). After three weeks, everyone was happy with their location.

On February 1, I asked returning gardeners to pony up for their plots. At the same time, I reminded everyone that the best seeds aren’t found on the shelves of big box stores. The gardening equivalent of those team busses began collecting and disgorging seed orders as gardeners began going through the Johnny’s of Maine and Pine Tree Seed catalogs and web sites.

The wheelbarrows need to work
to make food cupboard 
pickups possible

At the same time, the management roster was pulled into shape. Yes, community gardens have committees. The most important one deals with food cupboard collections. We now have two dedicated 600 square foot plots where volunteers grow food specifically to deliver to food pantries in Medfield and nearby Medway. In advance of every distribution date, wheelbarrows need to be set up at the front of the garden and ‘sweeps’ made to collect the produce contributed by gardeners from their own plots. In weeks where both pantries are having distributions, there will be twice-a-day sweeps four days a week. It takes a lot of coordination.

Two people are required to mow the perimeter of the garden using lawn mowers either donated or salvaged from the town’s transfer station. Another person is needed to keep the lawn mowers running and yet another volunteer has the inglorious task of keeping a fleet of 12 wheelbarrows upright. Did I miss anyone? Probably.

I collected lots of names

On March 1, I will throw open the garden to new registrants. I have 18 spots on the roster (OK, gardens) to fill. Fortunately, I collected 22 names at Discover Medfield Day. How many of those people will want to sign up? I have no earthly idea. That’s why I do a full-court press (sorry, that’s basketball) to get as many interested gardeners as possible. Ideally, I’ll even have a wait list.

Staking the garden for the new season

In the last week of March, two events take place that tell everyone the new season has started. There’s a talk on vegetable gardening at the town library on Saturday morning which usually draws a standing-room-only crowd (new gardeners are “strongly encouraged” to go). The nice part is old hands also show up and introduce themselves to the rookies. The offers to help are genuine. Friendships are born.

And, the next day, a team of a dozen volunteers marks out the garden and puts down 240 stakes to show the corners of each full plot. It is usually a comedy of errors, but it gets done. Eventually.

As soon as that’s finished, I throw the garden for everyone to start doing their thing. Except, just like those painful-to-watch early season baseball games where the snow has to be shoveled out of the stands, it’s really too cold to start planting in New England. But, it’s all part of the tradition, and who am I to question it?

Why I Know It's Spring...

Gardeners determine the first day of spring in many ways.  Some see a robin or hear a woodpecker and think to themselves, “Spring is here”.  Others mark it by spotting crocus, dandelions, or daffodils.  The evening serenade of marsh peepers from the nearest vernal pool has its own cheering section.

Crocuses are one way...

I brook no argument with those milestones, but I have my own:  the first day of spring is when the fence goes up for our vegetable garden.  Last year, the Winter That Would Not End did not give way to spring until May 2.  This year, that date was March 26.  What a difference a year makes.

A good garden
needs a trench

While the process has changed, for us, putting up that fence is a tradition that goes back decades. Once upon a time, the fence raising was preceded by rototilling the garden plot – a day-long process in and of itself.  For the past ten years, though, our vegetables have been grown in one plot of an acre-size garden and the town has thoughtfully provided the tilling service as part of our community garden fee.

Anyone who thinks a fence is just hastily-put-up stakes and netting has never had the experience of coming out to see everything in their garden chewed to oblivion by burrowing varmints.  Our fence begins with wielding a sledge hammer to pound ten stakes 18 inches into the ground, and it followed by the digging of a trench at least six inches around the perimeter of the site.  In a 600-square-foot site, that one task consumes an hour or more. 

The first six inches of the fence
is below ground to deter varmints

Only when the trench is done does the four-foot, half-inch mesh fence get affixed to the posts.  Rocks are added along the fence line to further deter would-be subterranean intruders.  The top of the fence is secured to the steel stakes and tightened where needed.  Four hours after the process began, the gate is installed.

Betty’s seeds arrived months ago (she orders early every year to ensure getting everything she wants).  The seed packages, in turn, get arranged and re-arranged on the dining room table as the layout for the garden takes shape, and a few elements of the garden don’t wait for the fence.  Leek seeds went into egg-carton incubators in mid-March, for example.

The fence is up and peas are in

We also have the complication that we’ve created two small raised beds at our new home.  The beds total just 64 square feet, but we’re starting spinach and lettuce in them with the idea of making that our “kitchen” garden while leaving the community plot for corn, squash, and other space-hogging vegetables.

But as soon as the fence was up, Betty was planting a row of peas and otherwise working the soil inside our plot to make it ready for the onslaught of planting that will come as the month progresses.

Outside Farnham's on the Essex River

Five hours after we started, we had a fence, a gate, and our first crop in place.  We celebrated by driving up to the North Shore for our first plate of fried clams and onion rings of the season at J.T. Farnham’s. 

Which, of course, raises the possibility that the beginning of spring may also have something to do with eating beach food…

The Problem With Groundhog Day

On Thursday of this week - February 2 - you will hear on the radio or see on television that Punxsutawney Phil climbed out of his cage and either did or did not see his shadow which means there either will or will not be six more weeks of winter.  Amazingly, this will be the 126^th year in a row that the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, has re-enacted this bit of municipal schmaltz.  Even more amazing, Punxsutawney is just one of nearly a hundred towns in the U.S. and Canada that will hold such early morning stunts.

Before I go further, let me first say that I think the film, Groundhog Day, is one of the most original stories every told by the American cinema.  For that 1993 film, Bill Murray can be forgiven all manner of duds (The Royal Tennenbaums, Charlie’s Angels) and Andie MacDowell will forever remain in my mind as one of the sweetest actresses to grace the screen.

Know thy enemy... many names, same varmit

But, to the best of my knowledge, we do not celebrate Benedict Arnold’s birthday in this country (I cannot speak for Canada), not do we set aside a day to honor, say, the Japanese Beetle.  Why on earth do we have a day that commemorates a rodent whose sole purpose in life, I fervently believe, is to destroy vegetable gardens?

To begin with, ‘groundhog’ is simply one of the many aliases for a nemesis we know well in New England – the woodchuck.  Elsewhere in the country, this creature has set up shop using the monikers ‘whistle-pig’, ‘land-beaver’ and ‘marmot’.  The woodchuck currently sleeping in a burrow just outside your garden likely has ID cards from many states, including one issued by the Algonquins for its original name, wuchak.

Woodchucks gravitate to gardens the way Red Sox fans seek out Fenway Park.  As the Cornell Extension Service rather dryly states it, “Woodchucks can become a nuisance when their feeding and burrowing habits conflict with human interests. They frequently damage vegetable and flower gardens, agricultural crops, orchards, nurseries, and areas around buildings. Damage to crops can be costly…”

Last year, my wife, Betty, designed a massive, 6,000-square-foot Chef’s Garden at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.  Prior to its new incarnation, it was the Society's Vegetable Trial Garden, and it was a veritable Sunday brunch at Cafe Fleuri for the indigenous Elm Bank woodchuck population.  In 2010, the site's last year as a trial garden, I helped Gardens Curator David Fiske pull plastic for and plant a large site for a new hybrid watermelon Mass Hort had been asked to evaluate.  As the melons ripened, woodchucks would choose several to sample, leaving behind well-gnawed produce.  On the day before the melons were to be harvested, the Groundhog Gourmet Society invaded en masse and functionally destroyed the plot, not even leaving the seeds behind.  The new garden incorporates a fence that goes down a full foot into the soil.

I might feel differently about Groundhog Day if I suspected that the rodent involved actually had some prognostication ability. However, no less an authority than the Canadian Encyclopedia, using data from 13 cities gathered over a 30 to 40-year span, puts the prediction success level at just 37%.  In other words, you can do better flipping a coin.

So, on Thursday, please excuse me if I’m not glued to the live, 7:20 a.m. webcast from Pennsylvania.  Looking out at my green lawn this year, I can’t help but feel that winter was over before it began.