Krisha and Ida Stoever. Photo by Mookie Forcella.
“What I appreciate about this garden is, first of all, the community. They’re such nice, friendly, helpful people, by and large.” So says Jaimee Uhlenbrock, current president of the Gardens for Nutrition’s volunteer board of directors. “We just had a Community Work Day. Everyone pitches in to help haul trash, inventory tools, clean and repair them, repair the deer fence… We also have two pot luck dinners each year, where people bring dishes that they’ve cooked with food that they grew in their garden plots.”
Although some board members have been involved with the Gardens as long as 16 or 17 years, many users are unaware of just how communal the project was at its founding, way back in 1976. It was a time of recession and high unemployment, and Ulster County officials were looking for ways to help feed the hungry. Sites in several towns were designated as Gardens for Nutrition and a paid position created for a coordinator to organize local volunteers who wanted to farm as a hobby (remember, this was during the heyday of the “back-to-the-land” movement) and donate the bulk of their produce for distribution to poor people through social service agencies, food banks, soup kitchens and homeless shelters.
“Larry Sommers was hired by the county to supervise two gardens,” Uhlenbrock recounts. Sommers was a recent graduate who had been involved in the establishment of the fabled Environmental Studies Site on the SUNY-New Paltz campus, later bulldozed under the Alice Chandler administration; he would subsequently go on to a long career at National Gardening and EatingWell magazines.
The Gardens for Nutrition project was launched with great enthusiasm and a lot of help from the Village of New Paltz and local businesses. “Pete Ferrante from Wallkill View Farm plowed it up each spring. At first there were no fences at all.” Then-mayor John Vett was a big booster, and gardened his own plot. “Larry told me that there was an enormous firepit in the middle of the garden where people would sit and have communal dinners,” Uhlenbrock recalls.
But that spirit of altruism quickly waned: After the first few years, “It didn’t succeed. It was hard to get people together to plant for other people.” There never seemed to be enough excess produce to keep supplying the cannery in Saugerties and the freezing facility that had been engaged to process food for distribution beyond the end of the growing season, so that part of the project folded, along with the network for delivery to county food pantries. The desire to help the poor just didn’t seem to provide enough of an incentive to undertake all the labor involved in maintaining a garden plot for a whole season.
So the Gardens for Nutrition underwent a metamorphosis into a form more closely resembling what they are today: a place where people go to enjoy the outdoors and the occasional company of like-minded green thumbs while growing tasty organic crops for their own nutrition and that of their families and friends, rather than needy strangers. One plot, named the Bill Quast Memorial Garden in honor of a past board president, is planted to supply Family of New Paltz, and some users voluntarily participate in the Plant a Row for the Hungry program; but donations of produce are no longer required.
