If any of you Granite Staters have been out and about in New Hampshire during the last few weeks, you would be hard pressed not to notice that garden season is well upon us—assuming that your allergies have not already indicated as much. One particular type of gardening that is rapidly gaining traction for its environmentally sound practices and social value is community gardening. And because I knew very little about community gardening prior to writing this article, I am going to assume that there are at least a few other people in the same boat and start with the basics.

At its most fundamental level, the name of the practice is pretty self-explanatory; community gardening involves a shared plot of land being gardened and harvested by a group of individuals or families. Most community gardens are the product of four necessary components: land, plantings, gardeners and some sort of system that governs the way the garden is allotted and ran.

A quintessential example of a fairly typical community garden can be found in Hopkinton. According to garden administrator Amy Carrier-O’Brien, early in 2009, when Hopkinton residents, along with Greener Hopkinton, an environmental committee of the town government, communicated to each other their interest in creating such a garden, Bill Chapin donated the necessary land in memory or his wife, Julie, who was an avid gardener.  Hopkinton Community Garden was thus brought into fruition. Plots of the garden were allotted on a first-come, first-served basis, with the only requirements for qualification being a $15 fee and that the gardeners be residents of Hopkinton and use organic products. All of the money generated goes towards the garden, buying products such as compost. The proprietors of each plot choose what to grow and literally reap the fruits of their labor.

Yet while Hopkinton has a more typical example of a community garden, there exist variations ranging from community gardens run by school classes, such as that of the Rye Junior High School, to gardens run by churches, such as the Unitarian Universalist Church Adopt-a-Plot garden in Concord. Canterbury Shaker Village’s garden, though not available for public use, provides a particularly unique educational look into an even more utopian method of gardening, which involved each member of the Shaker community contributing to the maintenance and upkeep on the entire plot. The broad range of foods, medicinal herbs, clothing dyes and ornamental plants grown in the garden were then distributed amongst the entire group.

Another noteworthy example is the Sycamore Field Community Garden in Concord, which combines intelligent social and cultural outreach, as well as general garden aesthetics. Having worked with refugees in various gardens, Cheryl Bourassa and Cathy Chesley, the Director of Immigration and Refugee Services for New Hampshire Catholic Charities, began brainstorming ideas to create a gardening system that would benefit refugees with low incomes. With the help of the New Hampshire Technical Institute (NHTI) and the Concord Monitor, their ideas culminated in the creation of the Sycamore Garden.  The garden is located on land owned by NHTI, and with a few exceptions, the plots are distributed to low-income refugees and their families, who then work on the plots and keep the food that they produce. The plots cost $10, a fee often covered by donations.  Similarly to the Hopkinton Community Garden, all of the funds go towards garden products such as compost and wheelbarrrows. The idea is that a refugee who might not be able to afford grocery store food can invest $10 into a plot and proceed to grow food whose value well exceeds $10, all while establishing a sense of community for them and their families. The program has been a success, continually growing as refugees from countries such as Bhutan, Iraq, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Berundi take advantage of this opportunity. In the near future, Bourassa, the Sycamore Garden coordinator, hopes to create a farmer’s market where refugees can sell the produce that they or their families do not use. Bourassa encourages people to stop by and observe what she described as the “U.N. of gardening,” a playful moniker meant to underscore the broad diversity and variations of gardens found at Sycamore.

Given the conveniences of modern life, in many ways we as a race have lost touch with some of the basic tenets of our society. Community gardening is a fairly painless but important step in reconnecting with the origins of not only our food, but also our communities. It is also an environmentally and economically sound alternative to the large-scale farming practices of corporations that can exhaust the land and introduce harmful pesticides and fertilizers into the environment, as evidenced by the Gulf of Mexico’s “Dead Zone.” The gardens listed above are but a few examples state and nationwide, and as cliché as it sounds, the creation of some of these gardens show that when it comes to small, local, yet important differences, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Note – Donations in the form of checks to the Sycamore Field Community Garden can be made out to the United Way, with Sycamore Field Community Garden written on the memo line, and mailed to 46 S. Main Street, Concord, NH 03301.  Donations in the form of leftover seeds can be dropped off at the NHTI library.