The Plot That Couldn’t Fail

Anatomy of a Community Garden

by Marianne Neifeld and photographs by Carolyn Blackwood, August 31, 2009

It is six o’clock on a Tuesday evening, the summer sun still strong. Raphael Notin, chair of Rhinebeck’s first community garden, is standing dead center of 28 garden plots. For all the enthusiasm and verve he has exhibited in the past 90 days to get this garden off—or, rather, in—the ground, he looks as if he has just been punched in the stomach.

“Well, it’s a good start,” he says.

He has just had a peek at what may be “late blight,” a highly contagious form of fungus. And it was on his tomato plant. His wife, Kim, co-leader of the garden, is quietly pruning, tending the Cherokee Purple tomatoes in their garden, before bringing Raphael over for another reason to fret: A huge caterpillar, the kind that some cultures eat for dinner, is attached to one of the tomato vines. They stare at it.

A neighboring gardener says, “Here, let me get it off for you—I have gloves,” and he peels the creature off before throwing it into the adjoining field.

And that is pretty much what this garden is about.

Every stakeholder in this small community garden knows a lot about caring, and lending a helping hand. People know who is who, which plots they tend, and what their communal job functions are. And this comes in handy, especially in getting advice from fellow gardener Chris Quimby, who volunteers with the Cornell Cooperative Extension. He tells the Notins that what they thought was the devastating “late blight” on their tomato plant appears to be classic “black spot.” (Although later in the summer, the garden’s tomatoes did succumb to late blight.)

And if you stand long enough on any given day or evening in this peaceful enclave, listening to the sounds—children playing in the recreational park’s pool across the parking lot, the chirping of crickets in the surrounding field, a shovel digging the earth—you will eventually be greeted with a smile from one of the gardeners and an offer of a green bean, a radish, a cherry tomato. The air seems to encourage good will.