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| Medfield's Community Garden |
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will remember
that I wrote just a few weeks ago about community gardening being wonderful
therapy for a country caught in the jaws of a pandemic, and how I predicted,
“people
will wave greetings to one another from their respective plots until it is once
again safe to offer a hug. In short, I think it’s going to be a
great season for the Community Garden.”
Well, scratch that idea.
A ‘community garden’ is just that… a community built
around a common interest in gardening.
Those gardeners, in turn, bring a diverse level of skills and depth of
experience. Some are true, hard-core
dirt gardeners; others are dipping their toe into the soil for the first time.
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| The garden, circa 2007. Some plots were never claimed... |
Running a community garden is akin to being the mayor
of that community. Ten years ago, Betty
and I somehow found ourselves in charge of the Medfield Community Garden; which
was then as dysfunctional as an activity could be. There was a four-page-long, single-spaced rule book, but no one cared about it, much less heeded its Draconian list of
commandments. There were nominally 40 plots but just 25 gardeners (some had assembled
three- and four-plot dynasties). Moreover, if a
gardener dropped out or the space was never assigned, the plot or plots grew
up in weeds.
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| ... others were abandoned, like 'Mom's Garden' from 2009 |
When we took over, our number one goal was to keep all the plots filled. Six
hundred square feet of fertile topsoil will grow a lot of weeds in just a few
weeks; and an abandoned plot will quickly spread its weed seeds to its
neighbors. Our solution to keeping the garden populated was to a)
drum up a lot of interest in the garden to ensure each plot was filled at the
beginning of every season; b) encourage gardeners to hang in, even if things
didn’t go perfectly (and, the corollary to that solution of not doing things
that would cause gardeners to leave); and c) have a wait list in the wings for
the inevitable mid-season dropouts.
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| Each year, Betty does a gardening presentation |
Having nominally mastered the art of running a garden,
we (and, by ‘we’, I mean Betty) turned our attention to educating gardeners and
upgrading the garden’s practices. Every March, Betty gives a well-attended vegetable gardening talk at our town
library. A steady stream of emailed
educational materials (including soil test results and an explanation of how to
read them) goes out to plot holders, and even simple queries receive serious
responses.
With the support of Medfield’s Conservation Commission
(which oversees the town land upon which the garden is located), we banished
pesticides, herbicides, and smoking. We
began sub-dividing plots to give gardeners a choice of size. We required fencing and well-maintained
paths. The garden grew by nearly half,
to 70 plots on a full acre of rich land; 30 of those plots 300 square feet in size and
40 of them the full 600 square feet. We went no-till when it became apparent our annual
plowing of the garden disrupted the soil food web underneath.
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| Despite its claims to the contrary, scientists were increasingly questioning plastic mulch's effect on the food soil web |
As a Lifetime Master Gardener and avid horticulturalist, Betty regularly attends
talks by people who are at the cutting of gardening science. By last year, what was once a murmur that perhaps ‘plastic
mulch’ (rows of plastic matting laid down over fields to warm the soil and
prevent weeds) had significant downsides, had become a rising, though hardly
universal, chorus of concern. Betty read the
studies, and reached a logical conclusion: there is nothing a plastic mulch
can do that an organic mulch cannot do, and there are truly important things
(like break down into humus and ultimately new soil) organic mulches can do
that plastic ones cannot.
We decided to implement a ‘no plastic mulch’ policy
effective with the 2020 gardening season.
It would affect perhaps four gardeners who had laid down plastic over
their entire plot in 2019, and another twenty or so who lay down plastic sheets
between raised rows. On March 29, the
date we opened the garden after staking it, we sent an email to everyone in the
garden giving our reasons for the new policy. To those gardeners who questioned
why we were making the change, we explained and they said, ‘OK, we understand’.
Seven days later, I was walking the garden when I was
stopped in my tracks by a garden partially cloaked in plastic sheets, with additionally
rolls of matting waiting to go down. I
went home and wrote the gardener – I’ll use the gender-neutral name ‘Reilly’. I politely pointed out the earlier memo. The following afternoon, Reilly responded at
length, starting with the observation that this was “an awfully silly thing to
quibble about during a global pandemic.”
The gardener went onto say, “there is ample science supporting the beneficial use of
landscape fabric.”
There are
two things I know with certainty. The
first is that, on any controversial topic, the first page of Google results – including
the ones that don’t say ‘ad’ – have been bought and paid for by organizations with
deep pockets, a vested financial interest, and an ability to ‘game’ Google’s
ranking algorithm. The second thing I know is that there is no upside in picking fights with my fellow gardeners. As self-appointed 'Garden Ogre', my management policy is to ‘nudge’ gardeners
into doing the right thing; not make enemies of them. I agreed with Reilly on a few points and offered
praised for having had the foresight to purchase a better grade of plastic
mulch. But, I stressed, the policy is the
policy. No plastic sheets. Please remove them.
Reilly
responded with an even longer missive, ending with the statement, “I intend to
leave my ground covering down.” That’s
when I went to Medfield’s Conservation Commissioner, Leslee Willetts, and said,
“This is above Betty’s and my pay grade.”
On April 12,
the scientific journal Global
Change Biology published the blockbuster results of a peer-reviewed study on plastic mulch, concluding its use boosted yields for a single season,
then became injurious to the soil and crops grown in it; all the while doing
long-term damage to that soil food web. Concurrent
with the publication of the study, China – hardly an enlightened paragon of environmental practices
– set in motion laws to outlaw the use of plastic mulch.
Ultimately,
Reilly asked for and, last Thursday got, a hearing (held via Zoom) before the
Conservation Commission. Reilly came prepared with a PowerPoint presentation. I responded with abstracts of several peer-reviewed studies and said Reilly was ‘flat wrong on the science’. The Commission voted unanimously to uphold
the ban on plastic mulch.
Reilly then
shifted gears and asked for a hardship exemption for this season, stating it
had taken Reilly’s family all day to put in the fence and plastic sheets, the
garden was now growing and well established, taking out the plastic was
impossible at this late date, and Reilly’s family was uneasy about going out in
a Covid-19 world for such a task. Reilly’s
plea swayed three commissioners. The plastic
would stay down for this season.
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| The photo I wish I had at the Commission meeting |
The next
day, I went to the Community Garden and took photos of Reilly’s plot –
something I did not think to do before the Commission meeting. There are no thriving plants. I could have taken out the plastic sheeting in
a morning without disturbing the site. If there were sprouted seeds,
they were likely killed by Saturday night’s hard freeze.
But Reilly’s
plastic will stay for this season. Betty
and I won the larger battle – a ban on plastic mulch. It will not make me alter my management style;
I’ll continue to change behavior by nudging, not by wielding a sledgehammer. But it was a learning experience that will
stay with me for a very long time: the world is full of people like Reilly who choose
to follow only those rules that do not inconvenience them.
