'A labor of love': Portsmouth's Community Garden opens this weekend; public invited

PORTSMOUTH – The Portsmouth Community Garden off Route 33 is set to celebrate its grand opening Saturday, after more than a year of planning and preparations by a group of dedicated volunteers.

Portsmouth’s first “community vegetable garden” was the brainchild of Tricia Donohue, who is now chair of the garden group’s Board of Directors.

In April 2021, Donohue, who’s a gardening enthusiast and owner of a garden design and maintenance business, came up with the idea to create a community vegetable garden on what was then just a patch of unused grass at the Park and Ride parking lot off Route 33.

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Volunteers transformed the field into a community vegetable garden

On Saturday, Donohue, along with her volunteers and board members, are inviting the public to come visit the Portsmouth Community Garden, which will officially open.

Volunteers worked “honestly hundreds of hours” to get the garden ready for opening day, she said during an interview this week.

“I have this incredible board and the most unbelievable group of volunteers, it’s really hard to calculate all the hours we’ve worked on this,” Donohue said. “It’s taken over my life in a very good way; it’s been a labor of love.”

The garden has transformed from the grass field to an impressive and elaborate community vegetable garden, which offers residents two sizes of garden beds where they can rent and grow their own vegetables.

There’s a fence that surrounds the individual garden beds to keep the animals from feasting on the growing vegetables, and community members will be able to gain access through a gate by punching in a pass code, Donohue said.

“It’s a 200-foot by 60-foot fenced garden,” she added.

Not only is the fence around the garden 8-feet-high, but volunteers also placed fencing 12 inches into the ground and 12 inches behind the fence to keep smaller, digging animals out, she said.

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“Hopefully that will keep the groundhogs out,” she said. “That was just a huge, huge job.”

When she first announced the community initiative, Donohue was both surprised and overwhelmed by the amount of excitement it created, and the amount of community support and donations they received.

Even though this is the garden’s first summer, all of the beds have already sold out, she said.

“We sold out in five days, we have a waiting list of 20 people, it might even be 25 by now,” she said. “The plan is to build more beds as the summer goes on and we get more money.”

Opening day includes a seedling sale

Donohue is “super, super excited” about Saturday’s opening, which is slated to begin around 10 a.m. and will feature a ribbon cutting, along with a speech by Mayor Deaglan McEachern.

Board members will also be welcoming members of the Portsmouth Community Garden “who already have plots,” Donohue said.

“We’re going to be assigning the beds and giving people pass codes to the gate,” she said.

A group they’re working with will be selling seedlings and part of the proceeds will go back to the group, she said.

Everyone who’s interested in seeing the Portsmouth Community Garden and learning about their mission is invited to attend, she said.

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“People can kind of walk around and see what we’re doing and see if they’re interested,” Donohue said.

The mission of the garden is “to create a community space … where individuals and local organizations can grow food in a peaceful, respectful, and inclusive environment.”

The community garden group has also set aside money for anyone who wants to grow vegetables in the garden but can’t afford the annual fee, Donohue said.

“Anyone who wants a bed, we do have money in our coffers for that,” she said. “We are also going to put aside two to three beds to grow food to give to Gather or other groups that need it. That’s part of our mission.”

After Saturday, the garden will be open to members seven days a week from dusk to dawn, she said.

Reached this week, McEachern praised Donohue and the garden’s volunteers for all the work they did making their dream a reality.

“Tricia is definitely the tip of that spear, but she doesn’t do it alone, there’s a lot of people committed to the cause,” he said. “We’re lucky to have somebody like that working so hard to bring a great asset like this to the community.”

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When he recently visited the site off Route 33, McEachern said with a laugh,” I was really surprised by how big the fence was.”

“It’s impressive. That’s a real deal community garden,” he said.

The City Council voted to approve the cost of connecting water to the site, but McEachern stressed, “It’s awesome to see when a group comes with up with a great idea like this, raises the majority of the money and brings something to the city that Portsmouth didn’t have.”

To learn more about the garden, visit the group's website at portsmouthgarden.org.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Portsmouth NH Community Garden opens this weekend; public invited