The Report to the Commissioner

Once each year, generally in December, Betty and I are asked to provide a report to our town’s Conservation Commission on the state of our town’s Community Garden. It is usually a fairly placid affair, documenting how many gardeners had plots, how much the garden took in, and how much it spent. Not exactly a snoozefest, but neither is it a page turner.

The report for 2021 will be an exception.

We started the year with a major public works project, or at least major by community garden standards. We’ve been at 55 plots for the past seven years (65 when you include gardens subdivided into half plots), all snugly conformed into an acre-sized space. There is talk of creating a second community garden on the grounds of the old state hospital on the north side of town, but that is at least five years in the future.

In 2020, we squeezed in 70 gardeners

Last year, Covid turned the United States into a country of gardeners; everyone wanted to be outside, but in a safe space, and what could be safer than a secluded community garden? The number of applications for gardens spiked, but we also had a like number of RSVPed regrets from long-time gardeners: a number of plot-holders elected to ride out the long quarantine in summer homes elsewhere. Cape Cod’s gain was also our salvation. By limiting all new applicants to 300-square-foot spaces, we squeezed in 70 gardeners, 20 of them new.

With the garden extension
we had a record 80 plots
and 86 families

It was clear, though, we had a one-time solution. At the end of the 2020 season, almost everyone wanted to come back, and most of the refugees who moved temporarily to Dennis and Falmouth let us know they would be returning home for the summer gardening season. We asked the town to allow us to add 3000 square feet of gardens – ten new plots if all were half-gardens. And, it isn’t that we couldn’t afford it. There is actually a line item in the town budget for the Community Garden Revolving Fund. All excess revenues over expenses go into the fund and, at the start of 2021, the account held sufficient funds to pay for the work. The Conservation Commission approved the expansion and, in April, we added the new spaces. It was excellent timing because we had 18 new applicants for gardens. We opened the season with a record 80 plots and 86 gardening families.

Had that been the end of the story, we would have filed our report in early November, taken our bows, and accepted the accolades of a grateful gardening nation.

Betty's talk was canceled
two years in a row

There were, unfortunately, a few hiccups along the way.

The first one can be blamed on Covid and human nature. Each March since 2009, Betty has given a talk at the town library on how to design and plant a vegetable garden. Attendance is required of new gardeners, but there is always a standing-room crowd from returning gardeners picking up pointers and 20 or more home gardeners that want to hear from an expert.

Her 2020 talk was cancelled on the Wednesday before her Saturday morning lecture as the world closed down. The poster for her talk was still the dominant feature of the library bulletin board almost a year later when the library opened on a limited basis. The 2021 edition was also a non-starter because of social

Our handy 'how to' guides
were unread, and 'old hands'
didn't want to move to plots
that received morning shade

distancing requirements. Instead, we emailed a dozen wonderful documents showing why and how to bury fences, use sturdy corner posts, and all the other things that turn novice gardeners into experts. Apparently, they weren’t read.  And, because returning gardeners were happy with their existing plots, no one was willing to move into the new section of plots or the front row of gardens that, because of trees along the road, get less sun. The folkways and mores that are passed down to new gardeners missed a generation. As a result, much mis-information was passed among the new gardeners. I will leave it at that.

New gardeners can borrow
'Ogre fencing' rather than
spending $50 or more

The second problem was one of our own making. Our town is perceived by the outside world as fairly well-to-do. There are Patriots first-round draft picks standing in line at the local Starbucks, for Pete’s sake. The average sale price of a home in town is nearing the million-dollar mark. Not everyone in town owns a Tesla Model S, though. We also have modest homes and apartments, and gardening is not a cheap undertaking. We may charge just $18 for a half plot, but thrown in a $20 start-up fee, $50 for steel posts and fencing, and $20-30 for seeds and starter sets, and you are quickly well north of a hundred dollars.

For the first time ever, four
gardeners walked away from
their plots mid-season

To that end, we offer first-year gardeners the loan of ‘ogre fencing’ – 50 feet of fencing, stakes, and tomato cages left behind by long-departed tenants. We will also quietly waive the start-up fee. While it levels the playing field for everyone, it also decreases what can best be called ‘skin in the game’. Something that has never occurred before happened in 2021: four gardeners abandoned plots in mid-season. Those plots were cleaned at the end of October by volunteers. Our question to the Commission is, do we implement a refundable plot-cleaning fee for first year gardeners, or count walk-aways as part of the cost of being equitable?

Finally, the Commission’s 2020 decision to grant a hardship waiver to a gardener who said he had already laid down plastic sheeting before a ban went into effect, came back to bite us in 2021. Covered with plastic for two seasons, the plot was biologically dead this year. An experienced gardener, moving up from a half plot, found nothing would grow in the space and pulled what remained of her plants in July. We reimbursed her fees and the cost of her vegetable sets, and promised her a new space for 2022.

We address the Commission in January. This year we expect a wide range of questions.