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?

The Summer of Giving Back

A carload of produce

For more than a decade, the community garden my wife, Betty, and I manage has had a good working relationship with our local ‘food pantry’, which provides a grocery-store-type experience for Medfield’s food-insecure families. Until this year, though, apart from contributions from our own plot, my involvement was primarily posting (via email to our member gardeners) a pickup schedule provided by one of our gardeners who is also on the food pantry’s board. I knew we were ‘doing good’ but had little insight into the process.

In March, that gardener notified me she needed to take the 2022 season off and asked if could Betty and I could fill in for her. Without hesitation, we said, “sure.” That’s when we found out what ‘being involved’ really means. It is a lesson that will stay with us for a very long time.

Our 75-plot community garden formally opens in April; but until early May the ground is too cold to grow much of anything except leaf greens. Our first collection of 2022 was little more than a few bags of lettuce and arugula.

This abandoned plot was planted
specifically for food pantry use

Something else, though, had also happened in the first month of the gardening season: several gardeners dropped out, and we had already exhausted our wait list. Our inspirational solution was to turn those vacant plots over to volunteers willing to plant crops specifically for the food pantry. Three plots were quickly covered in seeds, plugs, and plants.

I also confess my dormant business background was aroused from its 17-year-long slumber. For years, donations for the food cupboard went into two wheelbarrows at the garden’s main entrance. There are, however, no fewer than five entrances from the street. Thanks to a mechanically inclined member of the garden, we have at least ten working carts and wheelbarrows. I deployed all of them in such a way it was impossible to enter or leave the garden without passing at least two barrows.

To enter or exit the garden, you have
to walk by wheelbarrows

Further, specific ‘sweep’ times were established. The Medfield Food Cupboard requests a single delivery at 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Because gardeners have varying work and life schedules, Betty and I made certain everyone knew we would pick up produce from the wheelbarrows on Monday at sunset, Tuesday morning after the ‘early shift’ gardeners had left, and Tuesday afternoon at 2:30. And, if you couldn’t get to the garden, a volunteer would carefully pick you plot in your absence.

Suddenly, we had a carload of produce for each distribution.

We were aware there was a smaller distribution organized on Saturdays for home-bound clients of the food cupboard. One Friday morning, we offered produce for it and were told it wasn’t needed. “But,” our food cupboard contact told us, “you might see if the food pantry in Medway can use it.”

The Medway Village Food Pantry
with our produce on display

The Medway Village Church Food Pantry was indeed interested. On some weeks we were now organizing twice-weekly drives. How could we keep gardeners interested in contributing more frequently? Betty’s innate marketing skills came into play. We began soliciting photos of our produce arrayed for the two towns distributions. We emailed these beautifully composed photos, together with testimonials, to our gardeners. Contributions rose apace.

We are now in the final third of September. The Great Zucchini Glut is behind us and tomatoes no longer fill an entire crate; but I see winter squash ripening in plots, kale continuing to grow, and an emerging bounty of spinach and greens. We’ll keep contributing until there is a hard freeze.

We send our gardeners photos of
their contributions on display

This has been a learning experience; an eye-opener of major proportions. I get urgent emails from gardeners who couldn’t get to their plots but who don’t want their green beans to go to waste. Can we pick them? Yesterday, a gardener fretted her eggplant, though ripe, are still too hard and so might be rejected by food cupboard clients. I told her what the head of the Medway pantry told me: not only does every vegetable go; they’re the first thing to disappear off the tables.

By Betty’s count, we’re making as many as twelve trips a week to the community garden to collect produce, devoting additional hours to harvesting gardens that are not our own, turning over a corner of our basement to be a vegetable sorting and packing center, and making at least one delivery every week to a food pantry. It has been a busy summer and a satisfying season of sharing.

The Little Garden That Could

Medford, in the upper left corner
of this map, is just five miles
from Boston's Financial District.
The garden is located in that
first 'e' in Medford.

Three years ago, Joan Parker was feeling frustrated.  A long-time volunteer at a church-run food cupboard in Medford, Massachusetts, each week she parceled out canned and packaged foods to the mostly Haitian immigrants served by the charity.  While what she provided helped needy families stretch meager resources, Joan felt she should be doing more.

It wasn’t that Joan didn’t know how to grow vegetables.  As a Master Gardener, Joan helped maintain a 6,000-square-foot vegetable plot at the Elm Bank headquarters of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.  Most of the output of that garden made its way to food banks in towns adjacent to Wellesley, where Mass Hort is located.  Joan began to wonder if it might it be possible to create such a garden in Medford, a city just a few miles north of Boston’s Financial District?

Joan Parker

At the Mass Hort garden, Joan worked alongside Susan Hammond.  (I should add at this juncture I have known Susan for the better part of a decade.  Susan was Betty’s ‘protégé’ and the person to whom she handed off responsibility for that garden when Betty’s growing Garden Club Federation responsibilities took her in a new direction.)

Joan and Susan talked about the potential challenges of an urban, food-cupboard-oriented garden.  As it turned out, changes in the focus and direction of the Mass Hort garden made that project less attractive to the volunteers who worked there.  The Medford project seemed like a more freewheeling ‘re-boot’ for gardeners looking for a challenge.

The garden hugs one side
of the church and several
sites around the Rectory

Joan and Susan set about to design a model garden smack in the center of Medford.  Their sponsor was the Unitarian Church of Medford, a venerable institution that also sponsored the food cupboard where Joan volunteered.   Initial plans were for a very low budget garden, funded by the volunteers, using the existing soil and adding compost.  The site would be the (mostly) sunny lawn of the church rectory.  Master Gardener volunteers would run the garden.  A few hundred dollars seemed more than adequate to get the garden up and running, buy seeds, all those sorts of things, and a drip irrigation system could wait for a while.

Because the soil contains high levels
of lead, all planting is in raised beds.
That's Susan Hammond at right.

Which was when reality reared its ugly head.  The first problem was the site.  The grass lawn turned out to be integral to the church’s ministry. Groups met there and services were held there.  Joan and Susan regrouped.  They proposed a dispersed garden utilizing bits and pieces of church property.  ‘Terrific!’ was the response.  Soil tests were performed and plans were made to begin plowing up the ground to start the garden.

Then, those soil tests came back.  The soil contained toxic levels of lead.  All that lead paint and lead from other sources had left the ground utterly unsuitable for the growing of anything planned for human consumption.

To ensure no bed lies
fallow, these cups hold
spaces where a squash
crop will be planted next

OK, they concluded, we’ll do taller raised beds.  On further investigation, the raised beds would need to be kept completely apart from the soil underneath them.  OK, they thought, double-height raised beds with impermeable barriers between the beds and the soil. 

There went the budget. However, there was still a need for this garden, so the food pantry applied for and received a $1,000 grant from the Massachusetts Master Gardener Association.

In the meantime, other Master Gardeners were eager to start on the project.  They surveyed food cupboard recipients and got input on what kinds of fresh vegetables would be most welcome.  A request for exotic seeds went to Master Gardener Deb Haley, who investigated and sourced Haitian varieties.  Master Gardener Gretel Anspach provided access to large quantities of onions and leeks including specialty cooking onions.

This weekend, I finally got to see the garden I’ve heard about for three years.  The Master Gardeners opened it for visitors, and I was part of a tour group led by Susan Hammond. 

The ollas buried in these 'bag beds'
provide continuous moisture to
the vegetables growing there.

The garden is a small masterpiece.  It hugs one side of the church with raised beds for vegetables and an in-ground perennial garden.  Across the street at the rectory, three sets of distinct vegetable beds ring that grass lawn while leaving the center available for church functions.  All the tricks of the trade are used to coax the maximum production of vegetables from the site, including succession planting and space holders for second crops even as the first round are little more than seedlings.  Ollas, ceramic jugs embedded in the soil, provide continuous moisture because the drip irrigation system can be used only when volunteers are present (the faucet upon which the drip system is dependent has an unfortunate leak).

These handful of beds, with the help of
ten volunteers, delivers a bounty
of fresh produce every week.

This year’s first distribution of vegetables – pea greens – will be made in mid-May.  Thereafter, every week, a growing cascade of Haitian favorites comes to the food cupboard, with ten volunteers working the garden on a regular schedule.  The last distribution coincides with Thanksgiving, when the last of the autumn cornucopia is handed out.

It is an urban success story; proof that, with perseverance and resources, gardeners can overcome almost any obstacle.  It isn’t ‘The Little Garden That Could’; it’s The Little Garden That Does.