62Garden Customs and Practices
The 62nd & Dorchester Community Garden is open to all. You are always welcome to invite friends to enjoy the garden with us. Many other visitors may also come to the garden — to eat their lunches, take photographs, enjoy seeing the beautiful garden plots or just read a book in the sun. Many of us will meet and become friends with other gardeners and with garden visitors, people we might never have come to know in our daily lives. Gardens and gardening seem to bring out the best in all of us, and we want our community garden to grow into a special kind of urban neighborhood that enriches the lives of many people. Please help make friends and visitors feel welcome in our garden.
Each year, gardeners will have had to make visual progress on plots by June 1st or forfeit payment and have the plot re-assigned to someone on the waiting list.
Gleaning, Poaching and Helping Out
Garden plots are 100 square feet (and there are a few different dimensions). If you are sharing your borders with other gardeners please be respectful of those boundaries.
The vegetables grown in the garden belong to the grower. Please resist the temptation to pick your neighbor’s juicy tomatoes, etc, even if they look in danger of rotting on the vine. People who raise things, vegetables or children, generally know best about what to do with them; but a kind question or comment often helps.
There has been occasional poaching of vegetables by visitors to community gardens. This is regrettable and discouraging. If you see someone you don’t recognize picking vegetables, please ask them if they are a gardener. If they aren’t, please explain they are welcome to visit the garden but not to harvest.
Often gardeners are out of town just when a particular crop needs picking. If you need help with a harvest and don’t have friends who can do it, ask for help through the garden website or Facebook page (listed at the end), or just ask your neighbors in the garden. Same thing for watering when you are out of town — garden neighbors are here to help.
Weedings & Organic Refuse, Stakes & Baskets, Non-organic Trash, and Recyclables
As you clean up last year’s dead plants from your plot or as you pull the ever ambitious weeds that will populate your garden through the summer, please put them in the compost bins at the NE corner of the East lot and NW corner of the West Lot. Please remove wood stakes, wire baskets, plastic ribbon — anything that doesn’t rot from being outdoors — and cut or crunch up the stems as much as you can. See Compost Rules for more specific information.
Please put un-needed stakes, wire baskets, and supports next to the sheds or compost bays. These materials there are available for all to use.
The non-organic trash can go in the refuse containers by Beehive Park next to the West Lot - please don’t put weeds or plants in the containers, but rather take them to the compost area.
There are blue recycling bins at Beehive Park as well for bottles, cans and paper.
Picnics and Cooking
All are welcome to use the community areas. Please feel free to socialize in the garden and invite your friends to join you.
We hope to have a grill this summer and welcome anyone to use it responsibly.
On the water tank nearest the community space on the east side is a little length of hose with its own twist valve. Use this for a clean drink of water or for washing vegetables before cooking and eating. But please wash dinner dishes later at home.
Structures and Building Projects in the Garden
Please avoid large structures and elaborate building projects in the garden as much as possible. Over-development is a nation-wide cultural problem. And always leave enough room so that a loaded wheelbarrow and its driver can pass down the path comfortably.
If your building project — trellises, plant supports, cold frame — is more than about a foot or so tall, please construct it running north/south in the middle of your own plot so as not to cast your neighbor’s plot into the darkness. Also, keep flags and banners near the middle of your plot for the same reason.
And please avoid perennial plants like apple trees, raspberries, redwoods — they get big and make shade beyond your plot and they need a relatively large acreage.
Any material — baskets, wood stakes, bricks, etc — next to the compost bay on the East side and shed on the West — is available to you for use in your plot. And if you have material that you would like to offer to others for common use, please put it neatly in the same area.
If you are considering modifications to the shape of your plot, contact a 62Garden committee member first (info@62garden.com).
Fertilizers and Watering
Please, no non-organic fertilizers or insect/disease remedies. If you’re not sure what’s what, consult with a veteran gardener (live, through the garden website, or Facebook page), a good book, or the Morton Arboretum or Chicago Botanic Garden websites.
Watering is done the old-fashioned way — by hand. The water in the tanks and the watering cans are for everyone’s use. Please don’t try to hook up a hose to water your garden — enormous damage to the water tank system or to your neighbors’ gardens usually results. If you notice trouble with the water system, call or email info@62garden.com or 773.789.8147.
Paths, Dogs, Snakes and Rabbits
Please walk on the wood-chip paths, not through someone’s plot. And help your children to do the same.
Please keep your dogs outside of the garden. You are more than welcome to tether them outside to the playlot fence or 62Garden sign.
We are trying to re-establish snakes in the garden. They are of the “harmless-to-humans” variety, but they do eat bugs and other garden pests. If you can’t enjoy their company, at least let them go their own way; and ask the children in the garden to do the same.
Rent
Rent is $40 for the season.
Online Payments (preferred) via 62Garden.com: We will send you the link once we have a plot available.
Checks can be made out to : 62nd & Dorchester Community Garden (you will have to email info@62garden.com to request the address)
Communicating
You can follow garden happenings at www.62garden.com or our Facebook page, 62Garden.
The garden phone number is 773.789.8147 and the email address is info@62garden.com, feel free to call or email when you need to leave a message for someone on the garden committee.
