Community Garden Draws Neighbor's Ire

For nearly two years the benefits of a community garden have been touted in public meetings and presentations at borough hall. Gardens help teach people how to grow their own produce, organizers have said, while promoting healthier lifestyles and engendering communal pride.

CC Davis understands this and believes the garden could be beneficial for the borough and its residents, just not when it’s in her backyard.

The proposed Red Bank Community Garden on Marion Street on the east side of the borough abuts her property. The garden has been staked out and the individual plots tilled and planting could begin as soon as spring.

Eventually, there’ll be a fence erected to keep small animals and non-gardeners alike out. But remedies and promises to keep the space tidy and protected aren’t good enough for Davis.

“It’s intrusive,” she said, standing in her side yard just a few steps from the garden. “It’s too close for comfort.”

The Marion Street site was decided on after months of arguments and wrangling on the part of council and the community gardeners over where to locate the garden. Initially, the gardeners, led by Cindy Burnham, asked that the garden be located on a riverside plot of land next to the library at 94 W. Front St. Council balked at that idea and instead demanded the gardeners come up with a more suitable location.

Of the more than two-dozen areas considered throughout Red Bank, the Marion Street site – a small plot of borough-owned property with a pump house situated right in the middle of a neighborhood – eventually won out. There’s just one problem, Davis said. She and her neighbors weren’t given enough time to object.

When the borough was moving forward with plans to OK the Marion site as home of the new garden, Davis said she and her neighbors weren’t notified. Borough Administrator Stanley Sickles could not immediately be reached for comment.

“We all like each other, we all know each other on this street,” Davis, who favored Front Street for the location for the garden, said. “They could have just dropped a note in our mailboxes. It didn’t have to be anything official, just something to let us know.”

Davis, who has lived at the property since 1994, said she and her neighbors are worried about an increase in the animal population, the lack of 24-hour surveillance on the site and the coming and going of groups of people in a quiet neighborhood. 

Davis is also worried that the garden will negatively impact her property and interfere with her efforts to maintain her lawn and the hedges that border the adjacent garden site.

“If they want to have a garden so bad, a lot of these (community gardeners) have bigger yards and more money. Let them put it in their own backyard,” Davis said.