The pandemic has lengthened waitlists for all sorts of things. Colleges, swimming pools, dental hygienists. And now, dirt.
Shut in our houses for a year, coming off winter’s gloom, trying to move past the pandemic’s despair, Bostonians desperate for signs of life are signing up for community garden plots, or, rather, trying to.
“There is not a single garden that doesn’t have a waiting list,” said Vidya Tikku, director, Greater Boston, of the Trustees of Reservations, the largest manager of community gardens in the city.
“We’ve been contacted by people who don’t even live in the neighborhood,” said Malene Welch co-coordinator of the 95&9 Community Gardens in Roxbury. “We have a list of people who said, ‘I just want to put my hands in the earth.’”
Who cares if the plots, with their promise of fresh air, social distance, and hope, are as small as 2′ x 2′ and in the shade? The pull of the earth started early in the pandemic and it hasn’t let up.
In Jamaica Plain, Francesco Cupolo, an educator, mushroom forager, and man yearning for kale and community, has taken to cruising the neighborhood with his dog, trying to score advice from people who already have garden plots. “It’s like I’m trying to land a job,” he said.
He’s on at least two waitlists, maybe more, he can’t keep track, but recently he got bad news. “Thank you for checking in about your status on the Southwest Corridor Park community garden waitlist,” the response to his e-mail began, “and thank you for your patience.”
Patience?
That’s not a word anyone who knows of Cupolo’s quest for a plot would use. But anyway …
“There are 150 people ahead of you on the waiting list for Lamartine/Hubbard” garden, the e-mail read. “There are 124 people ahead of you on the waiting list for Lawndale Terrace … 151 people ahead of you …”
Reached by phone, the co-chair of the committee that manages the Southwest Corridor Park’s gardens, which dot neighborhoods from Jamaica Plain to Roxbury to Back Bay, confirmed the numbers are daunting. Her ode to gardening explains why.
“A lot of people have had enormous anxiety during the pandemic and a lack of interpersonal contact,” the co-chair, Tracy O’Brien, said, “and gardening with someone from your pod or on your own is very calming.
For some, she said, gardening is a hobby, but for others, especially with food insecurity at historic highs, home-grown vegetables are an essential source of fresh food that they otherwise could not have afforded or even found.
Beyond physical sustenance, there is the soul. “A lot of people are seeing beauty in nature,” O’Brien said. “It’s life-affirming.”
A small piece of land to call your own has become so appealing that some people lusting for plots don’t even seem that interested in what might technically be called “gardening.”
When Alex Pedicini, a 31-year-old tech startup worker, imagines himself in the South End community garden plot he’s wait-listed for, he doesn’t see lettuces or tomatoes, or picture himself becoming one with nature.
“I’ll probably be sitting in a chair and reading and maybe having a cocktail and watching my plants grow,” he said.
With demand growing, the City of Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development increased the budget for neighborhood green space by $200,000 this fiscal year, in large part to add community gardens, said Shani Fletcher, the department’s Grassroots Program manager. “We’ve heard about the waitlists.”
The long waitlists mean the pandemic could (please let this be true) be over by the time you get your garden, and instead of hanging around on the weekends desperate for activity, you’re now too busy, and the garden becomes a source of pressure.
But as Andrew Hong, a man waiting for a garden in Jamaica Plain, observed, “The pandemic has removed the conventional perspective of time, for better or worse. We’re all in this odd limbo where we’re putting long-term future plans on hold.
“In a non-pandemic world I might be antsy,” said Hong, 27, a health care consultant, “but now I’m not.”
What’s it like to get off the list and into the garden? If they’re prone to envy, the still-wait-listed might not want to read about Simone Miles Esteves’s lovely experience.
MilesEsteves an educator and mother of two boys, 9 and 18, applied for, and scored, a plot in Roxbury last summer, “when who knew what the world was going to be like?”
She liked that it wasn’t in her backyard, meaning she had to get exercise walking over, and getting to know neighbors she’d only passed by in the past, and the way her younger son connected with a tree.
She liked the eggplant she grew, and the eggplant parmigiana she made with it, and the strawberries, even though critters got to them before she did.
But beyond all that, she liked how the garden helped her grow. “I’m a city girl,” she said. “I grew up in Uphams Corner. Gardening was not something I felt connected to. But spending time in the soil, and growing something is something I can do. I can add on to who I am in the world.”
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.