What the phrase “community-supported agriculture” conjures in most minds nowadays are small, typically organic farms where local residents can invest in a share of the season’s harvest. Some of them require members to commit to a few hours a week of sweat equity. At others, you just show up on your appointed day and collect your weekly carton of produce.
Fifty years ago, community gardens were a revolutionary urban phenomenon. New York City was experiencing a fiscal crisis. Among the more obvious symptoms of the flight of businesses and the lack of municipal funding for maintenance of public spaces were rubble-strewn, overgrown lots – most often found in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. On the Lower East Side, a group of environmental activists coalesced, calling themselves the Green Guerillas (the single R is their spelling, still used today). They began taking over abandoned city-owned land, clearing it, planting sunflowers along road medians, lobbing “seed bombs” over walls into vacant lots.
By the middle of the 1970s, these renegade community gardens were popping up all over the five boroughs, and urban-dwellers were growing their own food. Longtime New Paltz resident Cara Lee, then living on the Upper West Side, got involved with a plot at the corner of West Ninety-Sixth Street and Broadway. “I’m still friends with some of the people in the Green Guerillas,” she reports.
Lee shares her story while conducting a tour of the Gardens for Nutrition, located on about five acres of municipally owned land sandwiched between the sewage treatment plant and the Nyquist-Harcourt Wildlife Sanctuary, just off Huguenot Street. She has gardened there “off and on for more than 20 years,” currently maintaining two adjacent plots with her grown daughter Margaret, whom she calls the Squash Queen.
Dating back to 1976, the Gardens for Nutrition have outlived many of their big-city counterparts founded in the same era. As New York City recovered financially and real-estate prices skyrocketed, many of the early community gardens succumbed to development pressure. The city put more than 100 such lots up for auction in the 1990s. Singer Bette Midler founded a not-for-profit called the New York Restoration Project that managed to acquire and save nearly half of them.
Now considered among the oldest of its kind in New York State, New Paltz’s homegrown effort has gone through some major changes over the years. Like its urban counterparts, it was conceived as a hands-on, proactive grassroots response to poverty and hunger. A SUNY New Paltz student named Larry Sommers was doing an internship at the Multi-County Community Development Corporation, a regional social services agency. “The Community Food and Nutrition Program was my thing,” recalls Sommers, retired publisher of National Gardening and Eating Well magazines who now lives in Vermont.
The MCCDC received a federal grant to create programs to fight hunger, to be disbursed via Community Action Agencies in six mid-Hudson counties. Inspired by a visit to the original Gardens for Nutrition in Rockland County, which had been founded to serve unemployed people, Sommers initiated a network of community gardens, with New Paltz as the site for the pilot project. He lobbied then-mayor John Vett, public works superintendent Larry Winters and the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Ulster County. The village government provided “a beautiful piece of riverbottom land, with beautiful soil,” where the DPW was already doing leaf composting. Pete Ferrante of Wallkill View Family volunteered to do the plowing.
For irrigation, “We got an old farm pump and put some PVC pipe in the Wallkill. That was the origins,” Sommers says. “The infrastructure just grew with the project.” Local residents rented about 20 plots in the first year. Before long there were 60 project sites, and CETA-funded coordinator positions in each participating county gave workshops to help novice gardeners learn to grow food.
A good year for gardening
Sommers and his associates also emphasized sustainability and alternative energy sources. Members learned to build solar coldframes from recycled materials as well as how to grow vegetables organically. “It was a great hub of appropriate technology,” Sommers remembers.
But CETA was eliminated by the Reagan administration, and the idealistic original philosophical model for the Gardens for Nutrition proved difficult to sustain without government support. Members were expected to donate excess food that they grew to local food pantries, soup kitchens and agencies providing services to economically distressed people in the county. Over time, the motivational emphasis shifted from gardening as an altruistic hobby to taking control of one’s own food sources for health reasons.
That impulse has strengthened in recent years, and the advent of Covid 19 made this a boom year for Gardens for Nutrition membership, according to Lee. “We have over 100 people gardening. It’s a big year. People were concerned about the food supply,” she says. “By May I couldn’t get seeds for a lot of things.”
Jaimee Uhlenbrock, president of the board of directors for the Gardens for Nutrition, concurs that the coronavirus has spurred interest in growing one’s own veggies. “Every time there’s economic instability, we’re brim-full,” she says. Whereas last year there were “seven or eight empty lots,” in 2020 there’s a waiting list for garden plots that become available, even late in the season. A certain amount of attrition typically occurs by July, when new gardeners “realize they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.”
Uhlenbrock repeatedly emphasizes that the members are “a wonderful community, 99 percent of them very cooperative, friendly, lovely and sharing.” But, she adds, “There’s always a pill in the group.” Some members who repeatedly, aggressively refuse to comply with the rules in their gardening contracts get asked to leave – although not until after several warnings.
New rules have now been added to protect fellow gardeners from transmission of the virus, including a ban on visitors inside the fence, gardening while symptomatic, and a requirement to wear a mask in all shared areas – the aisles, the toolshed, the soil amendment piles – or even when working inside one’s own plot within close proximity to a neighbor.
“We cannot have Covid 19 down at the garden. At the first appearance we’re going to have to shut down. So, we’ve had to be extremely vigilant,” she says. The aisles between plots are too narrow to allow unmasked people to pass each other at a safe distance.
As on the streets and in business establishments, the restrictions not going over well with a few garden users, and have even “caused strife between gardeners,” Uhlenbrock reports. One persistent offender got the boot after hosting “a pizza party with eight people and no masks.” Another got into a shouting match with a neighbor who was fearful of bringing the virus home to a frail 90-year-old parent. “We have a lot of people who have been considerate and respectful, and very few who refuse to participate and put everybody else at risk.”
Infrastructure issues have added to the directors’ headaches this year as well. Among the biggest and costliest improvements in the gardens’ long history was a new irrigation system, built in response to the toxic algae blooms on the Wallkill River in 2016. Water is now sourced through an infiltration well, set back 30 feet from the riverbank to allow it to percolate through the soil before collecting in a 16-inch concrete cylinder set deep in the ground, surrounded by gravel. “It’s the go-to means of getting water in Third World countries,” Uhlenbrock explains. “It’s very clean.” A 600-foot-long trench also had to be excavated to bring the water to the existing compression tank for pumping to the gardens. “We had to raise $20,000.”
This summer one of the pumps failed, and the other kept overheating from constant use. “We had the system go down six or seven times,” she laments. After numerous emergency visits from a plumber, the decision was made to replace the old compression tank and pump, which happened just two weeks ago. About 20 members chipped in $3000 to address the problem.
This crisis followed on the heels of the electrical failure of the site’s deer fence last winter. “There’s constant maintenance,” Uhlenbrock says. As a result, it seems likely that users will face a slight increase in the price of plot rentals next year. It’s not a decision taken lightly, since the gardens are supposed to be helping people with limited means. Currently, it only costs $45 for the whole season to rent a full 20-by-30-foot plot, $30 if you’re a senior (62+) or disabled. A half-plot (20-by-15 or 10-by-30) goes for $30/$25.
Still a bargain
Even if the price goes up by ten bucks, that’s still a bargain – especially considering that plowing service, irrigation water, compost and mulch are all provided for free, along with access to shared gardening tools and wheelbarrows. Members put up their own fences and gates if they want them; pilferage of crops is surprisingly uncommon.
Some plots that have been farmed by the same member for many years are beautifully landscaped and set with cozy outdoor furniture. Others are much less formal, though members must adhere to certain guidelines about weed control and the like. All are expected to pitch in on occasional community workdays, helping to maintain the common areas, tools and deer fence, as well as to clear vacant plots when necessary.
Overall, it’s a peaceful, verdant, even meditative locale. Being in her “garden empire” (which sports a handsome wood-metal-and-glass sculptural gate built from found materials by her husband, Steve Stanne) is “part of my day that I really enjoy,” says Cara Lee. “What I love is that every garden has its own style, based on everybody’s own knowledge and opinion about how to garden. I feel like I’ve learned a lot from other people.” She notes that the organizers and other veteran members host frequent informational workshops and are “very encouraging and helpful to new gardeners.”
To learn more about the New Paltz Gardens for Nutrition, apply to rent a plot or make a donation, visit https://gardensfornutrition.org. There’s also a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/npgfn.
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