Maeve Daby and Jarrett Hathaway add dried-out stalks to the compost pile at the Lake Placid Community Garden on Old Military Road Tuesday, May 9. Hathaway’s mother grows vegetables in two of the garden plots. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

My stomach tumbled with first-day-of-school-style jitters as I walked toward Saranac Lake’s community garden on Sunday, May 7.

I managed to secure a garden plot there for the first time this year, and Sunday was our orientation for the season. After months of tending to my seeds-turned-seedlings, I was excited to finally get my hands in the soil. But as I stepped closer to the garden, anxious thoughts played out to the beat of my boots hitting the pavement: Will it be obvious that I have no clue what I’m doing in the garden? What if I fail while everyone watches? As a new community member, would I be the “odd man out”?

Then I looked up and saw a friendly face smiling at me near the garden gates: former Saranac Lake Free Library Director Pete Benson. Though I didn’t recognize him at first, I instinctively smiled, walked up to him and said hello. I’ve interviewed Pete in the past — and we eventually connected the dots — but on Sunday we re-met as SPF-soaked strangers in the garden and spoke like new friends. I found out that he was equally clueless in the garden. I later learned that Pete has exclusively grown hops as a home brewer for more than 20 years, and he’s now looking to try his hand at growing other stuff — whatever he could manage. Some of my anxiety was immediately lifted.

I’m still a beginner in the gardening world. I first started growing in 2018 after I moved into a cabin on the St. Regis River. Behind the building was a sprawling 500-ish-square-foot garden. It was wild and messy with weeds and squash carcasses from years past. I hacked away at the weeds over the summer and planted all the seeds I could get my hands on — tomatoes, zucchini, corn, broccoli, herbs and flowers and pumpkins. Come September, I’d only harvested about a handful of beans, four purple potatoes and a zucchini or two. But somehow, by the middle of October, I found that I’d grown an entire patch of more than 10 pumpkins. I thought this was a bountiful harvest, and it’s kept me going back to the garden every year, seeking the thrill of pulling ripe fruit from the vine.

Since living at the cabin, I’ve gardened in another overgrown — but smaller — garden when I went to school in Binghamton and, when I moved to Gabriels in 2021, I built a 3-square-foot raised bed from a broken bookshelf. But this past February, I moved to a new apartment and needed off-property garden space. While the snow was still on the ground, I latched onto Saranac Lake’s community garden updates like a reporter awaiting breaking news. I started tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, broccoli, kale and flower seeds in my apartment window. And when the community garden plot sign-up started, I ambitiously claimed a 4-foot by 12-foot “kitchen plot.”

Here are the some of the plants Lake Placid News Staff Writer Lauren Yates is putting in her plot at the Saranac Lake Community Garden this year. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

When I arrived at the garden on Sunday, I knew which plot was mine — No. 5. One of the garden’s coordinators, Emily-Bell Dinan, had emailed a diagram of the plots with the names of the gardeners they’d belong to for the summer. I tried not to make eye contact with my plot — or the 44 others that spread across the gated clearing on Old Lake Colby Road — as more than a dozen gardeners gathered outside the garden to give our introductions. As we got acquainted, I learned that everyone had different levels of experience in gardening, from beginners like Pete and me to longtime farmers and 17-year gardeners. And as we kept going around the circle, I felt the rest of my anxiety lift — not only was I in good company with my fellow beginner gardeners, I also wasn’t the only one who was new to this community.

Along with their names, many people introduced themselves by saying how long they’ve been living here — some as little as six months — with a proud declaration of the Saranac Lake street they now live on.

It’s no secret that the Tri-Lakes are experiencing a real estate market boom alongside a housing crisis. Asking a new acquaintance where they live, how long they’ve lived here or how they secured their housing might be considered a little nosy in other areas, but in the North Country, it can be like asking someone how they hiked Everest. Conquering the challenge of finding housing, especially affordable housing, often comes with an interesting story that could serve as inspiration — or as a cautionary tale — for others. For those who’ve sought second homes here, there’s often a childhood story linking them to the Adirondacks, a lifelong desire that inspired them to fight tooth and nail to buy a home here in this competitive real estate market. Proud longtime residents will offer good-natured, tongue-in-cheek New Jersey jokes at these new residents, but we all know this is a great place to live and that finding housing here can be a feat — even for people above the area median Income.

At the community garden on Sunday, where residents both new and native gathered, we said the names of our streets in the same tone some people reserve for statements like, “I’m a winter Adirondack 46er.” There was deep-set pride in the voices of longtime residents and a fresh excitement from new residents. We all fought to live here, for the right to call ourselves locals. In that way, we all belonged.

It’s hard for me to separate work from the rest of my life. I’m prone to view everything in terms of statistics, from a news perspective, including myself. After all, I also fulfill a set of trends I’m reporting on here. I’m a millennial, a young transplant who moved here for work during the pandemic and couldn’t find housing in Lake Placid, the village I mostly report on. And as I walked through the sun-soaked garden to find my plot, I brushed shoulders and exchanged nods with a microcosm of local demographic and housing trends. There were longtime Tri-Lakes residents and people who moved here during the pandemic, Baby Boomers and millennials. There were retired people, business owners, an Adirondack Park Agency employee, a magazine publisher, farmers and volunteers.

Saranac Lake Community Garden (News photo — Lauren Yates)

On Monday, I talked about my observations with Kevin Prickett, the coordinator for the Wilmington community garden (and an APA employee). He’d also held an orientation on Sunday for the 11 gardeners in Wilmington’s 12-plot garden behind the Wilmington Community Center on Springfield Road.

Prickett has been the coordinator there for the last eight or so years, and he noted how the type of plot-holders in Wilmington has fluctuated with local housing, development and demographic trends. While the garden started out in 2011 with mainly retired folks, the mountain biking scene in Wilmington boomed in 2015, attracting younger residents and subsequently boosting younger garden membership. He started noticing more gardeners who were still working but who were toward the end of their career. Then, with the rise of remote work and more people seeking homes in the Adirondacks during the pandemic, Prickett noticed that more young remote workers and seasonal homeowners have sought plots in the garden. This year, he has two new plot-holders — both of which are remote workers who relocated to Wilmington during the pandemic.

The recent uptick in younger gardeners here also evokes the pandemic’s effect on the gardening world. More young people sought out gardening with the commonality of remote work and greater awareness of food security issues. A 2021 study by the National Gardening Association found that more millennials and younger generations — people born from 1985 on — sought out gardening during the pandemic. There were an estimated 18.3 million new gardeners created with the pandemic, with a 65% increase in millennial gardeners and a 44% increase in Gen Z gardeners.

But as I pulled weeds from the still-cold soil in my community garden plot on Sunday, I also tore away some of the statistics, my preconceived notions of others, of myself, of not fitting in and failing. Instead, I felt like a community member for the first time. And my fellow gardeners didn’t just represent a housing crisis, a pandemic-related demographic shift or a who’s who of that Adirondacks — they were just people in this community who were learning and bonding over the love, whether new or old, of growing food. We didn’t talk about finding housing, the latest local stories or how to manage short-term vacation rentals. We talked about how to trellis tomatoes for the highest yield and how to blend compost. And we all left the garden that day with beds weed-free and filled with fresh compost, and with the promise of new friends, a fun summer and fantastic food.

I guess I finally did get my stake in some Lake Placid soil. After pulling all the weeds from my plot, I spread over a fresh layer of compost that was sourced from the North Elba Show Grounds.

Maeve Daby and Jarrett Hathaway work at the Lake Placid Community Garden on Old Military Road Tuesday, May 9. Hathaway’s mother grows vegetables in two of the garden plots, which they were cleaning. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

There are several community gardens around the Olympic Region.

The Lake Placid Community Garden, coordinated by Cornell University’s Uihlein Maple Research Forest, is located at the corner of Old Military Road and John Brown Road. For more information, call the Forest office at 518-523-9337.

And the Keene Community Garden has a 35 plots at Marcy Field, along state Route 73. For more information, contact Roman Kucharczyk at landrk.adk@gmail.com or 518-576-7107.

The Wilmington Community Garden behind the Wilmington Community Center is seen in July 2022. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

The Keene Community Garden is seen at Marcy Field on Saturday, May 6. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

Lake Placid Community Garden (News photo — Andy Flynn)