Delores Cruz Calderón has always loved growing her own food.
Born in Mexico, Cruz Calderón remembers as a little girl going into fields near Oaxaca farmed by her brother to pick ripe tomatoes, tomatillos and squash right off the vine. Over the years, she’s never lost her fervor for farmed fresh food and, on many summer days, you’ll find Cruz with her sister Elizabeth at the Briggs Chaney Community Garden tending their two 625-square-foot plots. Cruz Calderón describes their produce as distinctly Mexican.
“We have jalapeños, tomatoes, tomatillos, spinach, onion, garlic, cilantro, flowers and epazote, an [aromatic] herb,” she says.
The sisters discovered the Briggs Chaney Community Garden in the early 2000s, not long after she immigrated to the United States. While it is located near a forested area and a stream, Cruz Calderón says in the early days, it lacked fencing and easy access to water.
Now it has high fences, three large cisterns near a WSSC hydrant, a network of hoses, plus free wood chips and compost provided by the parks. She says all these amenities help keep what she grows on her table year-round.
“I [grow] a lot, portion it out, give some away and freeze it,” she says, adding that she pickles jalapeños and cans them to last until the next growing season.
545 Garden Plots, 14 Locations
With 119 plots, Briggs Chaney Community Garden is the largest and among the oldest in the Montgomery Parks Community Garden Program, which got its first full-time manager in 2016, when Michelle Nelson took the job. Under her direction, the program has grown from 482 plots at 12 sites to 545 plots in 14 locations.
Nelson says her team, which includes one staffer, two seasonal employees and 25 liaison volunteers, works simultaneously on priorities that address garden expansion, maintenance, accessibility, education and food waste. They also have forged partnerships with nonprofits like HarvestShare to direct surplus food to people in need.
“Having volunteers in our program work directly with HarvestShare to do the weighing on site, and then transporting it to a food assistance provider that’s very close by, has really allowed for both organizations to benefit,” she says.
Sharing the Bounty
HarvestShare donations come exclusively from farmers markets, community collections, grow-to-donate sites and the Montgomery Parks community gardens. Founder and executive director Cat Kahn says in 2023, the nonprofit collected 24,608 pounds of fresh produce, with 3,400 pounds coming from the parks.
“And we know the demographics. We help create a meal with dignity,” she says. “[Unlike food banks], we are able to tailor it to cultural preferences. We know we can’t send sweet potato greens up-county because people don’t use them in cooking. But if we send sweet potato greens to east county, they take as many as we can share.”
Culinary Diversity Creates Community
Back at Briggs Chaney, crop choices speak to the county’s ethnic diversity.
Noel Matchett, who remembers chasing groundhogs in the pre-fence days of the 1990s, welcomes what is taking root near his garden, which, in early summer, are perennial herbs, carrots and potatoes.
“On one side, I have a person from Ghana, on the other a Pakistani, across the aisle is an Ethiopian, and next to him is a Korean, and just up across the way there are Chinese and Japanese,” he says. “It really is the United Nations.”
Pat Lynch, a master gardener and former part-time program coordinator who now serves as a volunteer garden liaison, remembers meeting two Africans working separate plots. She says each extolled the virtues of huckleberries for different reasons.
“I learned that one grew it for the greens and the other grew it for the berries,” she says. “It turns out the huckleberry greens are hard to find and incredibly expensive.”
Among the gardens is one designed as grow to donate, which Nelson says gardeners join to work, plus other communal tasks.
“People are required to contribute at least eight hours of community service [each season]. That could be supporting another gardener, filling the cistern or hauling away trash,” she says. “Working in nature, growing their own food, helping each other—it all nourishes the gardeners physically, mentally and emotionally.”
Magical Soil or Beginner’s Luck
Sometimes, an excess harvest can be overwhelming. Briggs Chaney gardener Kathy Roznowski ruminates on the “magical soil” or “beginner’s luck” that yielded football-size sweet potatoes in enormous quantities.
“We drove for weeks with a trunk full of sweet potatoes,” she says. “Everyone we saw, I said, ‘Come get some sweet potatoes.’”
But these gardeners say what feeds them most goes beyond vegetables.
“My best memory is during the heart of the pandemic when the [Montgomery] Parks allowed us to be here,” says Alan Perper, a master gardener in his ninth season at Briggs Chaney. “It was a sanctuary, and [we could] see, but not get too close to other people, and feel that, ‘I still have a community here!”
With an eye to the future, Michelle Nelson is creating a digital archive that celebrates the many hundreds who have stewarded county land over the years.
“As gardeners are transforming their garden plots, we know the land is also changing them,” she says. “We want to harvest those gardening stories and preserve them for future generations to reflect on.”
Nelson says garden rental plots go fast and urges gardeners to sign up for the 2025 waitlist, which opens online on the first Monday of December.
