They came directly from Ace Hardware to the Wheaton Community Gardens on a recent Saturday. Armed with a new hoe and rake, Wheaton residents Jill Meyer, a nursing home administrator, and Kimberly Baer, a social worker, were about to meet their little piece of earth.
Sure, it’s a dirty job, but Meyer and Baer said they were up to it.
“My dad had a garden all the time I was growing up, but then I just didn’t want anything to do with it,” said Baer as she looked over plot No. 44, the 20-by-30-foot patch of soil she and Meyer hope to turn into a bounty of herbs, vegetables and flowers by season’s end. “Maybe because it’s my own,” Baer added, “now it makes a difference.”
Baer doesn’t actually own the plot, not technically anyway. She and Meyer rent the space from the Park District, and the rookie gardeners have a commitment to tend the soil and nurture what they plant until fall. Like thousands of other area residents, Baer and Meyer are digging in and harvesting the fruits and vegetables of public gardening.
Park districts and municipalities throughout the area offer garden plot rentals for the growing season. Such programs require minimal effort on the part of public bodies, generally tilling the land in spring and turning it under in the fall, marking the individual plots and providing access to water. The rest of the effort is in the hands, and garden gloves, of those who work the soil.
Every spring, armies of gardeners descend on these public plots like ants at a picnic. Is it the fast-paced suburban life of the ’90s that makes us cry out for some private communing with Mother Nature? Is it fear of chemically treated vegetables? Is it simply a lack of garden space?
The answers are yes to all those questions and others. Naperville native Kenneth Drendel, who rents garden space from the Naperville Park District, suggested that the interest in community gardening is more than just a hobby. Retired from the seed corn business, Drendel lamented that the area has seen the farming life all but disappear.
“We in my generation-and even my children-had a chance to be exposed to (farming). But their children will see very little of it,” said Drendel, whose ancestors settled in Naperville in 1845 to farm. “One of the things the garden does is give those people who take their kids out there a chance to see things grow. My daughter wants her children to get closer to the soil. Maybe we’d be better off stressing this to all our kids.”
Elizabeth Tyler, who supervises Green Chicago, an urban gardening program in Chicago, said community gardening is a substitute for more than just farming. “We’ve kind of lost that sense of community. Community gardening makes it easy for people who can’t or don’t communicate with each other to do it,” Tyler explained. “It’s a common place. It’s a common endeavor.”
And it’s a common passion that is taken up in garden plots around DuPage County, from Villa Park, with 15 plots, to Naperville, with 650 plots. Among other communities that offer the service are Downers Grove, with 425 rental plots; Glen Ellyn, 135; Lombard, 100; Elmhurst, 70; and Wheaton, 58. Thirty plots also are available on the grounds of the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn.
The average cost for plot rental is about $17 for the season. Some communities charge more for non-residents or less for senior citizens. Most agencies have few plots remaining. In fact, representatives of the Wheaton and Naperville Park Districts said they have already sold out, or expect to. Both communities rented all their plots last year.
The land is not generally appropriate for other park district purposes, explained Jeanne Maher, program manager for the Naperville Park District. “It wouldn’t be a park, and it’s not big enough for a baseball diamond,” Maher said of the Naperville plot. “It’s also not really a moneymaker. We pretty much break even with it.”
Private gardening on public land is nothing new, according to Ted Flickinger, executive director of the Illinois Association of Park Districts in Springfield. “It’s a cyclical thing. Ten to 15 years ago, garden plots started to become very popular,” Flickinger said. “Then it faded out a little bit, but some still hung on.”
Flickinger calls such programs very successful overall but noted some drawbacks. “Park districts face problems with people maintaining their plots. Some (gardeners) do a super job, and some let them go until they became eyesores.” There are problems with theft, animal intrusion and vandalism as well, but community gardens still thrive in many locations.
“I’d say they are more popular in suburban areas, but certainly there are Downstate park districts that have them, too,” Flickinger noted, citing Champaign, Decatur and Peoria as examples. “I think now it’s generating some new interest. There’s more experimentation using natural nutrients rather than chemicals, and people like that idea.”
That’s exactly the reason Wheaton resident Carlos Monge rented a plot last summer for his vegetable garden and is back again this spring. “I don’t put any chemicals in my soil, ” explained Monge, a television news editor. Carrying buckets of water up from the nearby stream to water his garden delivers an additional benefit, Monge said: “Nice, good, sweaty exercise.”
In Lombard, community gardener Charlie Berndt offers another reason. “It takes my mind off a lot of things when I’m over there working on my plot,” Berndt said. “You get a sense of satisfaction when that first red tomato comes. And it’s such a friendly atmosphere because you’re out there doing what you like.”
Green Chicago’s Tyler attributes some of the interest in community gardening to current pressured lifestyles. Gardening can provide an emotional anchor for some people. “We have very few things in our lives that have a beginning and an end. We seem to be in a continuous rat race,” Tyler explained. “Gardening has a defined beginning and a defined end and a way to say, `I did it. I accomplished something.’ “
To others, there’s a welcome degree of control inherent to gardening. “With gardening, there really are no hard and fast rules,” Tyler said. “I can tell you that I sprinkle my greens with flour to keep the bugs off, and nobody’s going to say, `Well, that’s wrong; this is what you do.’ “
Not having access to garden space would seem to be another attraction to renting. But many who have taken park district plots for years do, indeed, have yards at home. Susan Grupp, horticulturist with the University of Illinois Extension Service of DuPage County, said, “Even some of my master gardeners who have yards aren’t satisfied with the growing conditions of their yard, so they’ll go out and rent a community plot and grow vegetables or a very specific flower there.”
One of those gardeners is Perry Woodward, who admits his corner lot in Wheaton has room for plenty of gardening. It contains 35 rose bushes, 65 bonsai trees, as well as several flower gardens and fruit trees. “But it’s not big enough for what I want to raise,” Woodward said. At his rented plot, Woodward tends vegetables and more flowers, which he donates to nursing homes for horticulture therapy.
But many other community gardeners, like Baer, an apartment dweller, and Meyer, who has a condo, appreciate renting a patch of land for their new hobby.
“We’re looking forward to being outside,” Baer said, as the two young women pulled weeds and plucked rocks from the soil. “My mother was totally taken aback when I told her we got a garden, but now we’re out to surprise her.”
