Tom Fedor/The Gazette
Jennifer Irmen of Frederick plants vegetables in a community garden plot made available at the Frederick home of Laurie Zook (not pictured) on Saturday.
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Laurie Zook didn't want to cut the grass in her backyard on South Carroll Street ever again.
So she decided to channel the energy she would normally exert to mow her 1/3-acre yard — counting the fuel needed to power the mower — and plowed most of the lawn into six, 12 feet by 10 feet community garden plots.
After tilling, fertilizing and advertising the plots on Web sites like Freecycle, Zook found three Frederick gardeners, including Gladden O'Neill and Jennifer Irmen, to transform her backyard into an urban, community garden.
On Saturday, Zook, O'Neill and Irmen were hard at work planting seeds and seedlings into the freshly prepared earth, only hours after they had met each other for the first time.
At one time, Zook said she had turned her back yard into a wildflower garden. The new garden plots are a way to build community and to make the land sustainable, she said.
"I wanted the land to be productive," Zook said seated in the shade of an umbrella.
The women had bought flats of heirloom tomato, pepper and Brussels sprout plants and various seeds from Dutch Plant Farm on Baughman's Lane in Frederick earlier that morning.
A system of rain barrels, a pond, drip irrigation and composters will sustain the garden. Two more flower beds on the side of Zook's 1910 brick row house have already been planted with broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and herbs. Zook said she uses organic gardening practices.
Zook noted that she is looking for more gardeners to take the remaining two plots at a cost of $75 each, through September. Gardeners can stop by and work on the plots from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and make use of the shared tools that hang on the side of her garage.
With a shovel in her gloved hands, Irmen of Frederick dug into the red clay soil in the plot she shares with O'Neill to plant her only eggplant seedling. A mother of four, Irmen said she grew up in Iowa where her family always had a garden. She said she found Zook's community garden through an e-mail in her Mom's club. "This is kind of an outlet for me," she noted.
E-mail Katherine Mullen at kmullen@gazette.net.
