NORWAY — As the summer sun beat down and a bee buzzed her head, Mariel Geiger bent over her rows of little pumpkin and squash plants, trowel in hand, and dug.
She’d lost track of which plants were which — she’d never grown both vegetables together before and she hadn’t labeled them — but it didn’t matter much at the moment. Both needed weeding. And they weren’t the only ones to be cared for. An entire row of tiny shoots, seedlings and leaves stretched before her, ready to become tomatoes, watermelon, basil, peppers, celery and strawberries.
Geiger had tried to maintain a much smaller garden before. It didn’t work out well — her yard was too sandy and she didn’t know what she was doing.
“We had carrots last year that were about this big,” said Geiger, thumb and forefinger an inch apart.
But this year she has hope.
This year she’s planting in Norway’s community garden.
“It’s a great learning opportunity, and just being able to socialize with a group doing the same sort of things,” she said. “It’s also a very peaceful place to spend your time.”
Norway’s Alan Day Community Garden is rapidly becoming one of the most expansive community garden programs in the state, but it is far from alone. Experts say Maine has dozens, if not hundreds, of them scattered among nonprofits and schools, vacant lots, municipal land, donated land and properties once scarred by trash or building demolition. Lewiston-Auburn alone has at least 16 community gardens that started with a single plot at Hillview Apartments in 1999.
As Mainers get more interested in where their food comes from and look for activities that both connect them with their neighbors and get their kids outside, community gardens are only getting more popular.
“My 9-year-old goddaughter . . . she adores it here. She loves being here. She’s just super dedicated to all of it, to the planting, to the learning, to even the weeding. Everything. She comes here all the time and she’ll just say to me, ‘I love being here,'” Geiger said. “I think, you know, that generation’s got to learn more. It’s a lost skill, and a lost art, for that matter. And I want her to have that opportunity.”
‘You just do you’
Community gardens have been around in the United States for more than 100 years, their popularity tending to rise and fall with the economy, trends in pop culture and society’s attitude toward home-grown food.
Recession and a growing enthusiasm for organic, farm-to-table meals have helped spur community gardens — and gardeners — in Maine. So has the enthusiasm of immigrants and refugees, many of whom grew their own food before coming to America and living in apartments with no land.
“Way back in my country, we would just go farming and digging. I just missed it, seeing plants and everything,” said 17-year-old Haredho Abdirahman, who left Somalia when she was about 6 and has lived in downtown Lewiston for years.
Today, she helps out in her family’s plot at the Knox Street community garden, one of more than a dozen run by St. Mary’s Lots to Gardens program.
“You just do you. You can do anything. It’s fun,” she said.
In Lewiston-Auburn, the gardens became a way to unify neighborhoods and convert urban blight into something neighbors could be proud of, said Kirsten Walter, director of St. Mary’s Nutrition Center, which runs Lots to Gardens.
“It’s hard to find things to connect with your neighbors, sometimes,” Walter said. “A garden physically draws people into a common space. And then, if they perceive they have nothing in common with somebody else, they can see what they are growing next to them. And that starts up conversations, and they trade recipes. It’s a very low-risk way of building bonds with people you don’t know.”
Walter helped start Lewiston’s Lots to Gardens program in 1999, when she was a student at Bates College. The program, supported by the Lewiston Housing Authority that first year, began with a single garden at the Hillview Apartments, divided into 15 plots for 14 families and a children’s learning garden.
The program picked up support from St. Mary’s Regional Health Center the following year and added another garden on Knox Street.
Today the program manages 16 gardens in Lewiston and Auburn. That includes the newest on Webster Street in Auburn as well as six Lewiston community gardens, two production gardens designed to teach youth the basics of farming, four children’s gardens and three maintained green spaces around the city.
“We now have about 130 households growing food for themselves,” Walter said. “Multiply that by the number of people living in each household. Essentially, if we can get people growing food in any way — even a container on their porch — research shows they are more likely to make a positive behavior change.”
The program now has gardens that are older than many of the students that work in them.
“And we have a generation that grew up with gardens, assuming that everyone should have a garden and that it’s a part of the fabric of their neighborhoods,” Walter said. “I think it informs their sense of self, when they can tap into what’s beautiful and productive around them.”
Garden and community center
No one knows exactly how many community gardens there are statewide. There’s no current central database and “community garden” can mean different things to different people. (Does a school’s vegetable garden count? Some say yes. Some say no. Some say it depends on who does the planting or where the food goes.)
But for most Maine community gardens, it comes down to this: Land is open for people to rent a plot for a small fee and then share the frustrating/enchanting experience of gardening.
“I was really skeptical when I first came here. I’d never done anything like this,” said 16-year-old Logan Hallee of Harrison, who volunteers at the Norway community garden. “But I’ve really fallen in love with this place. It just means a lot to see so many people benefiting. Like, nothing bad ever happens here. Everyone comes here and . . . everything’s good about it. “
Every garden has its own origin story. Some were started in a vacant city lot by the local rec department, while others were founded by a group of passionate volunteers who set down roots in a low-income housing development. The Norway garden opened three years ago after resident Alan Day died and left his Whitman Street property to his daughters with the understanding that it could someday become community green space.
Today, the three-acre property houses a food share collaborative, a garden reserved for food for Head Start, a young “food forest” that will eventually grow free fruit and vegetables for anyone who wants them, a youth leadership summer program, a summer meals program for school kids and a free workshop series.
“We almost always have a scything workshop,” said the garden’s executive director, Rocky Crockett. “People really get into that.”
That’s all in addition to the regular garden plots, which draw both novice and experienced gardeners — as well as one professional chef, who uses the fresh produce in meals at the Norway Brewing Co. down the street.
“He’s out here almost every day,” Crockett said.
The garden has become a community center, with a cadre of volunteers — some of whom helped build the site’s solar-powered well and electrical system — and a reputation as the place to go if you like to garden, or even think you might possibly like to.
Experienced gardeners say they like the camaraderie. Novice gardeners say they like being able to ask someone for help when bugs eat their watermelon plants.
“People showed up way earlier (in the season) and in more numbers,” Crockett said. “I actually had to turn people away last week because I have to create more space.”
Waiting list
The Norway garden has the room to expand to meet demand. Other gardens have had to add more sites.
Portland has nine gardens scattered around the city and is opening a 10th this fall. By the end of the year, it will serve 400 gardeners.
And newbies will still have to wait a year to get a plot.
“We’ve continually had about 200 people on our waiting list,” said Laura Mailander, urban agriculture specialist with Cultivating Community, the group that runs Portland’s gardens. “The more that we build, the more people that sign up for the waiting list.”
Some of those waiting gardeners have ended up taking their trowels a couple of towns over, hunting for a community garden in another community.
“They didn’t mind the drive because they couldn’t get into a garden in Portland,” said Priscilla Payne, secretary for the 5-year-old Windham Community Garden, which rents some of its 74 beds to gardeners from out of town.
In Maine, plot rental prices range from about $10 dollars a year to $50 or so. Most places significantly lower their fees or offer free plots for low-income community members. Some provide equipment, water and seeds for that fee, while others provide only the dirt to dig in.
By design, community gardens are often established in some of the poorest or most troublesome areas in town, which helps beautify the area, gives poor families access to fresh, home-grown food and builds community. But it can also make security an issue. While some gardens have never had a problem, others have experienced vandalism, destruction and theft. No one has quite figured out the perfect way to deal with that, considering the gardens have to be both open and secure.
“We had our first act of vandalism here just this last week. Basically, somebody just pulled down a little bit of the fence and knocked over a flower pot. There’s not really much you can do,” said Christa Galipeau, whose year-old community garden at a low-income housing complex in Presque Isle uses a locked gate and locked equipment shed.
“I think the best way to keep the security of your garden is to get more community involvement and more of a sense of ownership. The more that the people take part in the garden or live around the garden, the more they sense it’s their garden and it belongs to them, the more they’re going to look out for it and not tolerate that kind of activity.”
Back in Norway, Geiger already has that sense that part of the Alan Day Community Garden belongs to her. Just months into her first season, she’s planning for more.
“I’ve already asked if I can have this plot next year,” she said.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Comments are no longer available on this story