North Stonington - Starting a community garden sounds innocuous enough.

But the idea of small-time herb- and tomato-growing on the Hewitt Farm, a property deeded in 1967 for "recreation and park purposes" and subject to a slew of rules and regulations adopted after its purchase by the town, is a bit more complicated.

"It took a long time to get there," said Nita Kincaid, co-chair of the Hewitt Farm Committee, referring to the detailed proposal that garden supporters will present to the Board of Selectmen tonight.

The Hewitt Farm property constituted North Stonington's first major open space expenditure in the fall of 2008. Now, the property is both a source of income for the town - from rental houses there and from the Buon Appetito restaurant on the edge of the property - and a year-round oasis teeming with streams, forests, wetlands and more than a mile of marked hiking trails.

Kincaid said the idea of hosting a community garden on the property is not new. The first incarnation of the Hewitt Farm Committee, which formed several months after the town bought the property, discussed it while writing the regulations for the property's use. Selectmen formed the current committee round those rules in May 2011 as a way of providing direct oversight.

Since then the committee has fielded a number of untenable proposals, from art projects to events to ideas that just didn't pan out.

"We were finding that people would come in with an idea with nothing on paper and nothing concrete," she said.

So when resident Mary Ann Ricker approached the committee in November with her community garden plan, she met with some skepticism. Though the property is more than 100 acres, only a small percentage of it is cleared, flat land that could lend itself to a garden.

"Most people in North Stonington have a lot of land," she said. "So the question was, will people really use the community garden?"

Since then, a couple dozen enthusiastic volunteers, from future plot-owners to those wanting to help raise money, have stepped up.

Eventually Ricker won the committee over.

"They have never done this kind of thing before," she said. "The things that have happened at the Hewitt Farm property have all been episodic" - Boy Scouts camp-outs, for instance, and other one-time events. And other towns' community gardens are run either by the town or by nonprofit organizations.

Instead, the Hewitt Farm Committee will propose to the selectmen a new subcommittee: the Hewitt Farm Community Garden Association. With that comes the subcommittee's regulations: Beds must be maintained and weeded, no power equipment other than rototillers, no herbicides or nonorganic pesticides, no metal stakes or wires.

"I think the townspeople feel very strongly about the keeping the property a certain way, because it is a special place," Kincaid said.

The garden would be located behind the Greene Gables house at the edge of a meadow there, reachable by trail. In the pilot year, Ricker hopes to use half of the space. A 25-by-25-foot plot will cost $35; a 12-by-25-foot plot, $25.

The garden would look like a larger version of your average home vegetable garden, Ricker said, with crops like beans and pumpkins. Some would-be gardeners have plans to grow food for the Pawcatuck Neighborhood Center, in which case the plot fee would be waived.

Any funds needed - in the beginning, to till the land and put up a 7-foot mesh deer fence around it - would be raised by the association. Ricker is also looking into applying for grant money to help support the garden.

"I think that this will only enhance the visibility of the Hewitt Farm in the public eye," she said. "I think it's a wonderful way to build community."

a.isaacs@theday.com