Let It Grow
By Tammy Thornton
Butterflies, bees, and passersby can’t resist the Arc Community Garden on Main Street in Pleasantville. If you have driven south on Shore Road from Absecon, the towering flowers and bright green sign may have caught your eye and sparked your curiosity. Look closer, and you’ll find a bumper crop of produce including zucchinis, tomatoes, beans, cucamelons, peppers, loofahs, herbs, and flowers galore.
This beautiful public community garden is managed by C.R.O.P.S (Communities Revolutionizing Open Public Spaces) with help from their friends at Arc, the adjacent residential living community for individuals with disabilities, as well as neighbors, volunteers, and various members of the community. While Mondays are Garden Club days, anyone from the community can help in the garden or pick produce any day of the week. Often, you will find Erika Quarton-Neiderhofer, the “Food Production Coordinator” for C.R.O.P.S working in the garden and harvesting crops that are donated or sold at the C.R.O.P.S market in Atlantic City. So far this season, the garden has yielded over 400 pounds of produce. The nonprofit organization maintains several gardens with a mission to “alleviate food insecurity through empowering healthy, interconnected communities by cultivating fresh produce, ensuring access to nutritional food, providing educational programming, and advocating for sustainable food systems and collaborative solutions.”
The Arc Community Garden is designed for individuals who have intellectual or developmental disabilities. Arc residents and members of the community can interact in the garden in a safe and fulfilling way. In spring of both 2022 and 2023, students from Rowan University worked on the Arc garden to help make it ADA compliant. The students built a wooden boardwalk so the garden beds could be accessed from wheelchairs. The students also made boards for the raised beds, installed signs, and built a farm stand that will help the community sell their produce.
Throughout the season, C.R.O.P.S hosts special events at the Arc garden such as a garden tasting tour for the Girl Scouts and a monarch release by Stockton University. On Aug. 19 and Sept. 15, C.R.O.P.S will host Community Days from 4 to 6 p.m. The group will offer fun outdoor activities and will host talks about harvesting, fall crops, and what to plant this time of year. If you would like more information about the garden or some of these events, you can find the group on social media @cropsnonprofit or checking out their website at: cropsnj.org. You can also email them at: info@cropsnj.org.
Tammy Thornton lives with her husband, children, and crazy pets while enjoying a life of gardening, cooking, and going to the beach.
