Tenants of the Morgan Hill Community Garden might be without a place next year to grow their household fruits, vegetables and flowers – and raise produce for the needy – if the City declines to renew the nonprofit gardening organization’s lease at their current site.
The Community Garden opened in September 2010 with a long list of donations from local businesses and residents, as well as a three-year, $1 lease from the City of Morgan Hill, which owns the one-third-acre site on Butterfield Boulevard – between the courthouse and the VTA parking lot.
Within the garden are about 50 individual garden plots, ranging in size from 100 to 300 square feet, according to Morgan Hill Community Garden President Sherrie Wren. Each plot is available for rent to any Morgan Hill resident, though vacancies have been rare since the garden opened. The waiting list for future tenants hoping to get a spot has remained full at 20 gardeners.
But the Community Garden’s property lease with the City expires at the end of this year, and the City is likely to include the property in a long-range plan to manage City-owned properties that will be submitted to the state by December. City staff declined to comment on what that plan might say about the Community Garden site, which is currently designated as a future site for a new fire station in current planning documents.
Wren expects the two parties will start talking about the Community Garden’s future in the coming weeks.
Community Gardeners don’t just grow fruits and vegetables. They also grow flowers, ground covers and “beneficials that attract good insects,” according to Morgan Hill Community Garden Secretary Patrick Day. Plus, the tenants work together on one of the plots to produce organic compost that they share for growing within the facility.
And the Community Garden’s gardeners and board members also donate food to local food pantries, work with local schools to improve or build student gardens on campus and offer periodic workshops and seminars on unique gardening techniques, Wren said.
Plus, the tenants include five “master gardeners” who offer a wealth of knowledge for newcomers.
“The people in the garden volunteer to help other people garden in the city, and to help kids,” Wren said. “We’re going to open one of the garden plots just to elementary school kids. They’re going to plant seeds and get the idea of the process of growing things.”
While the City has long planned to one day use the property for a new fire station, according to the City’s Downtown Specific Plan, no timeline has been established.
Besides, that concept might change when the City releases a state-required long-term plan for the use and management of a list of properties the City owns in the downtown area. Those properties – including the current Community Garden site – were acquired by the Redevelopment Agency several years ago, then transferred to the City after the 2012 state-mandated closure of all RDAs.
As part of the process of dissolving the RDA and gaining permission to use the properties for the RDA’s intended purpose, the City is now working on the long-range property management plan to gain the state’s seal of approval for downtown development.
That plan, which is due at the state’s Department of Finance in December, will include the Community Garden property. City Manager Steve Rymer declined to offer any details about what that long-range plan will say about the nonprofit garden property, including whether its future will change from a new fire station.
“This is all still to be determined,” Rymer said by e-mail.
Other former RDA properties now owned by the City to be in the long-range plan include the Granada Theater and Royal Clothier buildings, as well as the former site of Simple Beverages at the corner of Third Street and Monterey Road. It will also include the VTA lot on Butterfield Boulevard, which the City owns jointly with the VTA.
The City still wants to develop the properties in accordance with the 2008 Downtown Specific Plan, which prefers a mix of residential, office and retail uses, as well as parking and other amenities to take advantage of public and private transportation options in the downtown.
Morgan Hill Program Administrator Anthony Eulo, who has acted as the Community Garden’s City Hall contact since the facility was established, said he is unaware of any potential future City plans for the site, but he acknowledged the Community Garden and other City-owned properties nearby are “highly valuable” due to their proximity to the Caltrain station.
“We really value what the Community Garden has done,” Eulo said. “They’ve turned it into a real community asset. I hope we will always have a place in the community where they can garden.”
For now, the Community Garden does not have a plan to relocate, though board members have considered a short list of public and private properties – most of which seem to be unsuitable for a garden, according to Wren. The current site is easily accessible in a central Morgan Hill location. The gardeners have long hoped to expand at the current site, where there is room for up to 24 more plots.
“We feel like the City has been incredibly generous, and we’d love to keep it,” Wren said.
The Community Garden, run entirely by volunteers under the umbrella of the Morgan Hill Community Foundation, is limited by its available resources to purchase a property, but there are other possibilities, according to Wren. One of these could be to enlist the services of a land trust to acquire a suitable property and preserve it forever as a community garden.
At least one private property owner – the Chiala family – has offered the use of a parcel for a future community garden and agricultural education center, as part of the City’s long-brewing plans for the Southeast Quadrant area east of the U.S. 101. That property near the intersection of Hill Road and Tennant Avenue contains “four or five acres” that are currently planted for commercial farming, as well as a historic “turn-of-the-century” farmhouse and barn that could be preserved for educational or agritourism use, according to Gordon Jacoby, a fellow SEQ property owner.
Jacoby and the Chialas have talked with the Community Garden directors about using the property before, but only at a “conceptual” level, Wren said. At first glance, the Chiala property appears to be too far out of town for many of the Community Garden’s current tenants, she said.
Day said year-round, he spends an average of 10 hours per week tending his Community Garden plot – though some summer, spring and fall weeks surpass that workload. Day and his wife grow “the whole gamut of popular vegetables in this area” on their Community Garden plot – such as potatoes, onions, carrots, tomatoes, peppers and green beans.
“We have a garden at home, but we also like to be a part of a bigger community, and associate with other gardeners,” Day said.
