Sharon Garden Project: Warming up for Waterbury

What's better than spending a warm spring weekend getting the garden ready for the growing season? After a long winter that stretched itself across the face of early spring, nothing seemed better to me when we started out for the Sharon Garden Project at the crack of dawn Saturday.

My husband, daughter, and I traveled North to the home of psychotherapists Dan and Mary Gates in Sharon, Connecticut, to work with a whole bunch of friends and strangers on the half-acre of organic gardens and the shed that are being created to serve the needs of folks in Waterbury by putting fresh vegetables on their tables.

The Gateses make their land available to the parishioners of St. John's Parish in Waterbury and Waterbury Baptist Ministries so that these two groups can feed patrons of Greater Waterbury Interfaith Ministries and Jubilee Harvest who need but can't afford fresh food.

"We've been doing this for nine years," Dan told me on Saturday. "I'd come out here and think to myself, why am I mowing this when I could be growing food on it?" At the time, Mary was associate pastor of St. John's, so the Gateses were well aware of the need for food in Waterbury. Members of that church threw themselves behind the project to create the gardens. So did the congregation of Waterbury Baptist Ministries, led by the Rev. Maner Tyson, which had been providing groceries to hungry people for some time through its Jubilee Harvest ministry. Over the weekend, about 45 people from both churches and elsewhere worked on the garden and the shed.

"We decided to grow produce here that would give us the greatest yield for the size of this garden and the labor available. And people were really surprised to think anybody would put fresh food in their hands," said St. John's parishioner Bob Toffey.

Bob has been working at the Gardens from the very beginning and has seen the project through trials and errors as well as its achievement and growth. He helped build the frames for the raised beds, and he installed a pump to bring water up from a nearby stream so the plants could be watered without relying on the Gateses' household pump. He and Dan learned about putting aluminum foil balls covered with peanut butter on newly-installed electric fencing after the deer grazed over an entire crop of tomatoes. "We didn't want to hurt them, but we wanted them to get the idea, and it worked," Bob said.

Each year, the garden is improved in some way through the combined efforts of caring people. After the barn is completed, the garden may well see an old shed transformed into a chicken coop.

Dan said that no money changes hands to make this project work. The gardens are maintained and improvements are made through contributions from churches, grantors, and other friends. The gardens are maintained by volunteers from the Waterbury churches, neighbors who are interested in the project, and other friends. Volunteers who know nothing about gardening get all the direction they need to keep the garden growing from folks who know. "You don't need a green thumb--you really don't have to know anything about gardening. You just have to ask what needs to be done, and someone will show you," said Lorraine Barker, a member of the Outreach Committee at St. John's. Lorraine and her husband Ray helped paint siding for the barn designed by Hank Fotter so that Sharon Gardens will have a place to dry vegetables and seeds, store equipment, and hold small gatherings.

Harriet Fotter, administrator for St. John's Parish and a longstanding supporter of this project, said, "Everyone here is connected in some way, whether they are members of the church, friends of the people working here, or people who know people who are."

In the time we were there, we saw the gardens throw off winter and cradle vegetable seedlings. We saw an old foundation transformed into a shed ready for its roofing and siding, and a lot of good folks feeling tired and happy--and connected--under a warm spring sun. What's better than that?

Here's a brief video with Dan and Maner talking about the project.