The Last Garden Report

We’re throwing in the trowel.

For the better part of a decade we participated in the local community garden, starting first with a small 10x10 plot then later expanding to a 10x20 and after that building a 10x20 enclosure we ended up calling the gopher ranch before moving to a new 10x20 enclosure that we tended for three years.

Cost effective?  Not hardly.  We spent thousands of dollars over the years on seeds and seedlings, various timers and irrigation systems, hundreds of lbs of soil amendments and manure, tomato towers and the like.  What we harvested tasted delicious, far better than anything we purchased in stores or at farmers’ markets, but it cost far more than commercially available food.

And you know what?  We didn’t care.  Gardening got us out of the house, into the sunlight, having fun growing stuff we could enjoy and share.

Best of all, we met and befriended a number of other gardeners and participated with them on community events.

During the pandemic the garden proved a sanity saver, allowing us to get out and socialize at safe 10-foot distances, staying connecting with one another.

We really enjoyed it.

So what changed?

There’s new leadership at the community gardens.  Nice, pleasant, courteous…to your face.

But when push comes to shove…

One of the obligations for everyone participating in the community garden is to contribute 12 hours to helping maintain the commons:  Participating in workdays, weeding and watering, other duties, etc.

Soon-ok and I regularly completed our obligatory 12 hours no later than late summer / early fall.  We still showed up for workdays despite meeting those required hours.

By July this year we met our 12 hour obligation (12 hours by Soon-ok’s count; I logged us in at 14, but that’s my opinion).

The new leadership sent us an e-mail saying we only had 10.5 hours on record.

Okay, no biggie, we thought.  We e-mailed ‘em back, said we thought we met our obligation already, and asked them to double check to make sure our hours were correctly recorded.

At the very least we expected the leadership to recheck their records.  At the very least, if I were king of the forest, I would acknowledge a couple who regularly met all their minimum obligations and more could be spotted a mere 1.5 hours, especially since they showed a history of participating on workdays long past their obligation.

Instead we got a flat statement we needed to do another 1.5 hours.

Gardening is fun, but it’s also work.  The new leadership -- nice and polite as they are face-to-face -- can’t be bothered with doing the right thing if it challenged their predetermined conclusions.

Soon-ok and I mulled it over, asked ourselves if we really wanted to keep schlepping down to the community gardens when we had a patio that we could use, and decided to surrender out enclosure.

We left out timer and irrigation system for whoever comes next but cleared everything else out.

Everything comes to an end, and if the new leadership intends to issue edicts without responding to individual gardeners’ concerns, then it’s time for our participation at the community garden to end.

So, no more gardening reports.

Expect patio reports in the not too distant future.

© Buzz Dixon

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