Donna and Gerry Freitag have announced their latest additions, tomatillos and sugar baby watermelons.
With watchful eyes and nurturing hands, the Crystal Lake couple will raise the two newest crops they’ve added to their annual garden, along with dozens of other plant varieties they’ve tended for years. The Freitags have already devoted many hours to their two 20-by-40-foot plots, beginning with plans they drew for this year’s garden back in January.
But as much as they love gardening, the Freitags don’t actually own their plots, not technically anyway. This is the eighth straight spring the couple has rented space from the Crystal Lake Park District.
Like hundreds of other area residents, the Freitags are digging in and harvesting the fruits, and vegetables, of public gardening.
Park districts and municipalities throughout the northwest suburbs offer garden plot rentals for the growing season. Such programs require minimal effort on the part of public bodies: 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 answer to all those questions is yes. “It’s very nurturing to take nothing and see something come out of it,” said Sue Gwinnup, superintendent of administrative services for the Arlington Heights Park District, which offers public garden plots. “You can go to any farmstand and buy tomatoes and green peppers. But there’s a lot of satisfaction when you can actually grow something yourself.”
And thanks to the availability of community plots, gardening is a pastime that need not be denied for lack of space. Don’t have a yard? No problem. Just rent one.
“We absolutely adore it,” Donna Freitag said recently as she looked over her rows of freshly planted vegetables in Crystal Lake’s Hill Farm Acres. By season’s end, Donna, who works in a medical office, and Gerry, who works for a northwest suburban newspaper, expect to be canning, cooking and sharing their bounty.
Donna suggested that their hobby fills an increasing void. Outlying areas that were once valued for their rich soil have experienced a building boom, and the Freitags lament that the farming life has all but disappeared.
“It’s just terrible watching all this farmland go,” Donna said. “I’ve lived out here my whole life, and Gerry’s parents farmed in Schaumburg, and his grandparents, too. We just practically cry when we get in our cars every day,” she said about driving past the now-developed farmland.
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 the northwest suburbs, from Woodstock, with 12 plots, to Crystal Lake, with 150 plots. Among the communities that offer the service are Arlington Heights, with 123 rental plots; Rolling Meadows, 42; Streamwood and Hoffman Estates, 36 each; and Palatine, 20.
The average cost for plot rental is about $15 per season. Some communities charge more for non-residents or less for senior citizens. Most agencies have few remaining plots for this year. In fact, spokespeople for the Palatine, Arlington Heights and Crystal Lake garden plots said they have already sold out, or expect to soon. In Woodstock, the park district has a waiting list.
“Over the last three to four years, (community gardening) has definitely gotten more popular here,” said Arlington Heights’ Gwinnup.
The plot land is not generally appropriate for other park district purposes. For example, the Cypress Gardens plots in Arlington Heights are located in a retention area.
“If it wasn’t garden plots, it would just be green space,” Gwinnup said of the site. “It’s not really all that big. We couldn’t put a softball diamond there or anything.”
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,” he said. “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.”
Another draw to public gardening involves its social aspects. Joan Schratt, a horticulture educator with the Kane County Extension Service, describes the attraction as “the kinship of people who love gardening.” According to Schratt, “You’re likely to find someone else out there (at the gardening plots) you can talk to and share things with.”
Just like in any neighborhood, community gardeners get acquainted with those they regularly meet.
“We have had people from all over the world,” Donna Freitag said of her garden plot neighbors in Crystal Lake. “We’ve had some English people across from us, and on the other side people from India.”
Freitag noted that sometimes meeting those from other cultures leads to meeting new plant varieties as well.
Though there are others around, for many people gardening also can provide an escape from the everyday pressures of home and office. “Once I’m there, I’m pretty much undisturbed,” Schratt said about working her community plot in Crystal Lake. “And I know I’m not going to be bothered by the phone or by intrusions.”
Green Chicago’s Tyler attributes some of the interest in community gardening to those fast-paced 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 on 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.”‘
Not having access to garden space would seem to be another incentive to renting a plot. But many who have taken park district plots for years do, indeed, have yards at home. Schratt said it was the poor growing conditions of her own yard that prompted her to rent a plot.
“I have big, old trees and it’s really impossible to grow anything that’s sun-loving,” said Schratt, who has rented a plot for five growing seasons.
But for those without a yard altogether, community gardens offer a perfect solution. And the more convenient the gardens are, the better.
“That’s the reason we bought our condo,” Donna Freitag explained. “When we saw this particular condo, we walked out on the porch, saw the plots a matter of 100 feet away, and went, `Sold.’ Now we’re out in the sunshine most of the time and we love it.”
