In a Burlington garden on a sunny morning in August, five people gather around a basket full of large, curvy, green squash hanging from a scale.
“That’s 19.5 pounds right there,” one of the gardeners says.
They place the squash on a picnic table with 3 pounds of kale, 10 pounds of tomatoes, onions, wax beans, peppers and more. The group converges around the table and begins dividing up the mass of food.
“Did you get any carrots?”
“What’s the spice level of these peppers?”
“Did everyone get the tomatillos that they wanted?”
Cucumbers are passed across the table, and a recipe for quick pickles is exchanged. Once the gardeners have full bags of produce and are ready to be on their way, there’s still food left over to be donated to the local food pantry.
This is often what it looks like after a peak summer harvest at the Seedsong Collective Garden, as well as two other collective gardens run by the Vermont Garden Network.
In collective gardens, gardeners work in the same plot together and share the harvest equally. They may have a say in group expectations and often make shared decisions about what to plant. (In the case of Seedsong, the 20 members vote at the beginning of the season on what they’d like to grow.) Everyone puts in a similar amount of work for an outcome that can, in a good season, vastly exceed what an individual could accomplish alone.
“You're doing everything together. You're planting together. You're harvesting together. You're managing the space together. You're existing within the place as a group, versus existing in the plot of land as an individual or as a family,” says Angela deBettencourt, the garden program manager at Vermont Garden Network.
A number of gardens operate with this type of model across the Northeast and Quebec. The people who help run them say the relationships that members cultivate are part of what makes them special.
The Depot Community Food Centre in Montreal runs five collective gardens in the city’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighborhood. At the Depot’s collective gardens, longtime gardeners may work beside someone who has never grown their own food before. Members of the neighborhood’s immigrant communities may grow crops alongside lifelong Montrealers. Older gardeners may do less physical tasks while an able-bodied 20-something does strenuous weeding.
This is the “mixité sociale” — a French term that refers to people from diverse backgrounds coming together in a space — that collective gardens cultivate, says Kristen Perry, the organization’s urban agriculture manager. She says the benefits of intentionally bringing people together in these gardens extends far beyond the harvest.
“What the gardeners mostly report back in their testimonials is the friendships they make and the mental health aspect are both really important for them,” Perry says. “Those are the things that come up most often.”
The collective model allows for gardens to function as a third space — neither home nor work — she says. “It's not in-your-face social, but it actually does create a lot of those social links that people really need for our wellbeing.”
Sheryl Rapée-Adams and her husband created a collective garden in 2014 on their property in Montpelier as a way to use the extra land and get involved with the community.
“It is about people who want to do things together, maybe even a little more than gardening. Or maybe equally,” Rapée-Adams says. “I've said that we balance gardener morale and joy with garden productivity and success, and sometimes I put my finger on the scale a little more toward garden morale and connection and joy, because that's really what this garden is about.”
There are some boundaries to how much an individual can stray from the group’s plan for how or where something might be planted, or what tasks the garden needs. It can sometimes be a balancing act, Rapée-Adams says.
Rapée-Adams has asked people to leave the collective because they were “not a good fit for this particular project.”
“Sometimes, somebody else's vision of how a garden should be just isn't going to work here,” she says.
Twenty households are part of The Garden at 485 Elm on Rapée-Adams’ property. They’re expected to put in two to four hours of work a week and abide by certain guidelines.
To become part of a garden collective, members are usually asked to pay a fee or make a donation — many offer a sliding scale — and sign a member agreement that deals with expectations around work time, food harvests and interacting with fellow gardeners.
“You get access to the vegetables, and you also get access to the land and all of the tools that you would ever need, and all the seeds and plants, and then weekly education and guidance on what needs to happen in the garden that week,” deBettencourt says.
That access to land can open the door for people without the space or the means to start their own gardens. Both Montreal and Burlington have growing immigrant communities, and a study out of Alberta showed that collective gardens can not only help reduce food insecurity in these communities, but also give participants a sense of belonging in their new homes.
That’s part of the goal at the Vermont Garden Network’s Family Room Collective Garden, located at Burlington’s Ethan Allen Homestead. Here, you’ll find crops like okra, white African eggplant and jute leaf or molokhia — culturally meaningful foods for some of the New American communities in Burlington. VGN maintains this collective garden space specifically for folks participating in the Family Room, a local parent-child center that serves many New American families.
While many of these gardens churn out enough food in the peak season to rival a community supported agriculture membership, a single setback can dash the hopes of the entire group. In 2023 and 2024, the Intervale flooded, damaging plants and impacting the harvest at Seedsong. After two years of flooding, many of those gardeners left Seedsong, but that didn’t mean they gave up on collective gardening. Members of that same group formed a new, independent collective garden outside of the floodplain in Burlington’s New North End, called Sungold.
The people who run collective gardens will tell you that the model is constantly evolving, and it’s not always perfect. But for the gardeners who join these collectives, the sense of togetherness — and the potential for pounds of fresh food — are well worth the work.
