Jonni Ford and Carrie Merfeld have a dream. It used to be somebody else’s dream, but now it’s theirs. Their dream: to grow a truly community community garden.

Ford is owner of a boutique nursery in Hanover, Zen Hollow Greenery. Merfeld is a biology teacher at Windham Tech.

And the garden of their dreams is a little grouping of raised beds in Baltic, right next to Shetucket Village senior housing.

When the garden was somebody else’s dream, it didn’t really flourish the way dreams dream. It was there, but nobody really noticed. Nobody really cared. Nothing much happened, and nobody even remembers how it got there.

But there it is. And Merfeld drives by it every day on her way to work. She sees it and feels compelled to do something about it.

Her motives, she says, are mostly selfish. As a biology teacher, she wants to give her students a lab for hands-on lessons in things that live — in this case, functional things, things that feed.

The school can’t afford a “Green lab,” but that doesn’t mean she can’t have one.

The Green Lab Garden will include peas, herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, maybe even pumpkins. Maybe even potatoes grown in a cage.

While Merfeld’s on the science side, Ford’s doing a lot of the dreaming and putting it into action.

She’s got seedlings sprouting in the Zen Hollow greenhouse. She’s got Agway contributing soil and compost. She’s got Stonewall Apiary contributing buckets and pallets. She’s got Sprague Scout Troop 19 gearing up to help. She’s drafting kids to paint murals. She’s looking for volunteers at Shetucket Village. She started a Facebook page: Sprague Community Garden.

That’s what makes a garden a community garden. It’s a garden that grows more than vegetables. It grows a community.

Community: The core of the word comes from the Latin communis, meaning “common, public, general, shared by all or many.”

It takes a village

Why are Merfeld and Ford looking for a summer of weeding, watering, and worrying?

Says Ford: “Because it’s a good thing to do. It’s a way of paying forward, a chance for a community to maybe all agree on something, even if it’s just a tomato.”

Says Merfeld: “I want to spread a little light. This town has been through a lot since I moved here 11 years ago. We’ve lost so much. In a small town like Sprague, where the school is hurting, the whole community suffers. Between the school, the pandemic, the political climate … it just feels good to do good. So when we can, we do.”

Both of them say they’ll be happy, that it will worth it, if they can put fresh vegetables on the plate of someone who’s hungry.

Merfeld tried to do the garden last year, but it didn’t take off. The community wasn’t there. Nobody helped. Somebody stole seedlings.

The weather was hot and dry. The pandemic didn’t help.The weeds won. The garden produced one small radish, that’s it.

But that was then. This is now. The dream lives.

Civilization never moves forward if every setback leads to stasis. Surrender is bad for the spirit, and without spirit, a community isn’t a community. It’s just a bunch of people ignoring each other.

A community like that needs a garden.

The garden’s going to have a sign out front that says, “Take what you need.” A chalkboard will announce what’s ripe.

The garden needs community contribution. It needs muscle. It needs somebody to water, people to weed.

It needs people with carpentry skills. It needs plywood, paint, tools, pallets, landscaper fabric, a small chalkboard, a lockable garden box, a lock.

It doesn’t need seedling thieves. It needs goodwill and dirty fingernails. It needs community.

Anyone interested in volunteering can call or text Zen Hollow Greenery at (203) 909-1973 or send a message through the Sprague Community Garden Facebook page.

Glenn Alan Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.