Trolling for Gardeners

Part of my job description as Garden Ogre is to keep the spaces in the Medfield Community Garden filled. Between full (600 square feet) and half (300) plots, there are 75 gardening families needed each year. Many people return season after season, but each year brings dropouts. Medfield is a mobile community: people move. They also put up cottages in Maine and New Hampshire that come to occupy their summers. They started gardening with their toddlers, but now their offspring are tweens who think putting their hands in soil is gross. Some simply age out; get tired of it all and trade pickles for pickleball. And a few don’t get invited back.

Gardening is also cyclical. During the pandemic, there were a dozen names on a waitlist because the Community Garden was one of the few things you could do without a mask. Going organic waxes and wanes. Last year, I entered the March pre-season with 17 gardens to fill. I did so… barely.

Which is why, on a glorious Saturday in September, I spent six hours trolling for the 2025 class of newbie gardeners at Discover Medfield Day.

There used to be a recipe for finding those new gardeners. Back in 2009 when Betty and I first became the Town Garden Committee (everyone else resigned), it was a matter of preparing an article and finding fresh photos for the weekly Medfield Press and its upstart shopper-style competitor, The Hometown Weekly. The print edition of the Press ended in 2021. For the past two years, The Hometown Weekly has filled its limited news hole with high school sports and real-estate-related copy. When the paper failed for the second year to run the article I had prepared, I got the hint.

Social media nicely filled in the gap for the most part. There were (and still are) Facebook groups like ‘Concerned Citizens of Medfield’ and ‘Friends in Medfield’ that yielded terrific results… until they didn’t. Eyeballs got distracted by videos on a dozen other channels. And, while I am no fan of Mark Zuckerberg, turning over even my correct name and date of birth to TikTok scares the bejesus out of me.

Which, as I note above, is why I went ‘old school’ and took a booth at Medfield Day at a cost of $150. I already had the requisite 10’x10’ tent, two folding chairs, and the offer of a table. For $285, a sign-making franchise conjured up a spiffy and colorful 2’x 9’ banner. I printed up handouts on green paper ($26). And, Betty selectively picked the Community Garden of enough ripe vegetables and flowers to cover that table from end to end.

When I first sent out a cheerful email to those 75 gardening families asking if eight of them could volunteer two hours of their choice to chat up Medfield families about the joys of community gardening, I expected to fill all slots within a day. Instead, I got… crickets. Well, not exactly crickets. I got perfectly valid apologies that their Saturday was already spoken for (including half a dozen who were committed to working other booths). So, I tried a second time and got one volunteer. By weeding in my plot at the right time of day, I convinced a second gardener to lend his time. And, on Friday afternoon, one more volunteer surfaced.

It was going to be mostly Betty and me… except Betty was still recovering from back surgery and sitting or standing for extended periods (dictated as 20 minutes by her physical therapist) was verboten. So, it was mostly going to be me.

Have you every tried to set up a tent when your helper is visibly wincing every time you say, ‘Pull!’? Have you ever tried to hang a banner when you forgot to bring a stepladder? We started at 9 a.m. and barely had everything in place when Medfield Day formally opened at 10. In that hour, the loose end of the banner repeatedly knocked over the (plastic) vases of carefully picked flowers; reducing dahlias and zinnias to bare stalks. The handouts scattered with a gust of wind. The tabletop sign stating proudly that all the produce in the display would be given to the Medfield Food Pantry would not stay upright until Betty found enough counterweights.

But the booth did open. And the good weather brought out thousands of people (the majority, alas, not of age to sign up for a garden). I and my three volunteers handed out flyers to more than a hundred interested parties and 25 people provided email addresses asking me to get in touch with them next March when gardens become available.

I met people who had been part of the community garden decades ago and cherished their experience. I met people new to town who were amazed the garden existed. I also stopped and gently admonished at least a hundred kids who reached into the bowl of cherry tomatoes, expecting they were one more freebie for the taking.

Was it a success? Yeah. Was it hard on my back standing out in the warm sun for all those hours? Definitely yeah. Did Betty and I polish off a bottle of wine with a takeout pizza when we got home and fall into bed at 8:30 p.m.? Most assuredly yeah.

Would I do it again? Ask me in July.