It’s peak gardening time as summer winds down and yet again the long ait list for a garden plot at the Belmont Victory Gardens continues to grow.
Eager residents yearn to grow their own food and flowers and be part of a cherished community, but are still stuck on hold and excluded.
Anecdotally, after waiting one year on the waitlist myself, I was told the waitlist had grown from 3 years to 4! Meanwhile, anyone walking the narrow grass paths of the gardens can’t help but notice the irony: multiple plots sit uncultivated and are completely overgrown with weeds. How can that be when the first rule listed in the handbook states that gardens must be actively gardened and well-maintained the entire growing season? Many of us have noticed that the same plots appear to be abandoned year after year. Is it a community garden or a microcosm of the plague of inaccessible real estate?
Why are these plots sitting unused while eager gardeners wait years for their turn? The issue seems to be one of oversight. There’s little to no transparency about how plots are assigned or monitored. How many warnings does a gardener receive before a clearly neglected plot is reclaimed? How often are plots reviewed for use? The process feels both opaque and unenforced.
In a time when food costs are soaring, corporate food sources are unregulated, and the local community is more important than ever, this situation is more than a lost opportunity. Families like mine want to learn to grow their own food and share the joy of gardening with our children and neighbors. Instead, empty plots collect weeds while the town collects names of eager gardeners on an indefinite waitlist.
The garden administration owes residents an explanation and, more importantly, a plan to rectify this issue. There must be a more active and transparent approach to managing this shared space. If someone is no longer able to maintain their plot, it should be reassigned quickly and fairly. In its current state, the Victory Gardens feels like an exclusive privilege masked as a welcoming space.
Let’s treat the gardens as the community resource they were meant to be rather than locked behind the closed doors of a passive administration.
It’s time to fix this before another growing season goes to waste.
Danielle Barnett, Belmont resident