WHERE CURIOSITY GROWS
- Adrianna Donat
- 19 hours ago
- 7 min read
Inside the Maplewood Youth Gardening Program
By Adrianna Donat
L to R: Eden Prager holds freshly-picked spinach, Ameer Azma is getting ready to plant an eggplant seedling and Annelise Salierno with harvested radishes. Photos by Julia Maloof Verderosa.
On a Saturday afternoon in Maplewood, the MapleFood Garden in the greenhouses behind Maplewood Town Hall has the pleasant, slightly chaotic, feel of a place where real work is getting done by people who are not too worried about staying clean.
There are kids crouched over the beds, looking for worms and roly-polies with the seriousness of scientists and the joy of kids playing in the dirt. There are seedlings to move, seeds to tuck into the soil, labels to write and weeds to pull before they get too comfortable. It smells like well-composted earth. Someone is usually excited to use the hose. Someone is usually delighted by what they have found underground.
This is the Maplewood Youth Gardening Program, run by Monika Hannemann, a Columbia High School ninth-grade biology teacher, longtime horticulturist and enthusiastic translator of the natural world. Hannemann has led the program since 2010, long enough that some of the children who once showed up with small hands and big curiosity are now adults who can talk about the garden as a place that helped shape how they understand work and community.
The program began as a collaboration between the Maplewood Garden Club and YouthNet, the community service organization that works with Maplewood Middle School and South Orange Middle School to provide academic support and enrichment activities. It eventually became part of the Maplewood Garden Club’s Youth Garden Program, open not only to YouthNet students but to the broader community. The Youth Garden is geared toward children ages 3 to 18 and their families.
Verderosa.
Today, 89 families are on the program list. Before each session, Hannemann sends an email with the week’s plan and asks families to RSVP. She caps participation at 20 people, a number that keeps the garden from becoming too crowded and gives each child a chance to do more than watch from the edge.
A typical session begins with a walk through the garden to see, as Hannemann likes to say, “what’s growing on.” The group checks what has sprouted, what has changed, what is ready to harvest and what needs attention. Then they break into rotating jobs: weeding, planting seeds, transplanting seedlings, labeling, watering and whatever else the season requires.
“We end the program with watering the entire garden and sometimes the gardeners, too,” Hannemann says.
Before moving to Maplewood, Hannemann spent 11 years as a professional horticulturist and educator at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. When her husband, Jim, accepted a teaching position at Fairleigh Dickinson University, a colleague suggested Maplewood. The town had train access, but just as important, he told her, it had an excellent garden club.
That recommendation turned out to matter. Hannemann moved here in 2008 and found some of her first local friends through the Maplewood Garden Club. “They welcomed me to this town and made me feel like part of the community,” she says. “They are still part of my core friend group.”
After leaving Brooklyn Botanic Garden, she became a licensed arborist for SavATree but found that her favorite part of the job was teaching people about trees. Eventually, she moved into full-time teaching. The garden club, she says, kept her hands dirty, “literally and figuratively.”
In early spring, participants prepare the beds by digging the soil and mixing in compost. They pull the weeds that made themselves at home over the winter. They use square-foot gardening, stringing the long beds into smaller plots so they can make the best use of limited growing space.
It is a method well suited to Ma p l e w o o d , where many families love the idea of growing food but may be working with modest yards, narrow side beds or a thick overhead canopy.
In late spring, the garden is focused on cool-season crops: lettuce, radishes, spinach, snap peas, broccoli, kale, cabbage and carrots. As the season warms, summer crops will move in:
beans, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beets and basil. Some plants, including kale, collards, Brussels sprouts, beets and Swiss chard, can carry on through much of the year, producing through spring, summer and fall.
For children, the harvest is often where the magic happens. Carrots and radishes are especially satisfying because they are hidden until the moment they are pulled. A child can tug at green leaves and have no idea what is waiting below: a perfect radish, a tiny carrot, a lopsided surprise or the kind of vegetable that looks as if it might walk away on its own.
Community member Daphne Berkovits says those moments are among her favorites: watching a child pull up “a funny two-legged carrot” or seeing their face after tasting a freshly harvested radish. The garden, she says, has also become part of the rhythm of her year. Beds are cleaned and strung after the snow melts. Snap peas go in as close to St. Patrick’s Day as possible. Tomatoes wait until the weather is reliably warm.
“Every year has its quirks. You can’t get too attached to the outcome,” Berkovits says. “Ultimately, providing fresh food that the garden gives to local families feels like a sweet, small gift of community.”
That gift is then bagged, labeled and delivered.
When vegetables are ready, participants harvest them for families to take home and for donation to local food pantries, including those run by Our Lady of Sorrows and St. Joseph’s Church, as well as the Maplewood Health Department. When the garden produces an especially generous amount of radishes, garlic and tomatoes, Hannemann says extras have also gone to Newark food pantries.
For Danielle Herring Dazulma, who joined the program with her young daughter in 2023, that service component was essential. “It was very important to me that she see and actively participate in service for others,” Dazulma says. Her daughter already loved plants, worms and rolypolies, so the garden was an easy fit.
“Our fearless leader, Ms. Monika, makes gardening fun for the kids and very informative for novice planters like myself,” Dazulma says. “It is truly a joyous occasion to see the garden transition from barren to lush with neighborly TLC. Knowing our hard work helps others is the best part – and tasting the tomatoes, too.”
Some families have been part of the program for so long that the garden has become a kind of family timeline. Satoko Hoshino’s children began when they were 4 and 6. Now they are 19 and 21.
“Throughout all those years, Monika’s guidance and leadership have continued to teach us about
curiosity and growth, resilience, and the importance of community,” Hoshino says. “Not to mention the most delicious vegetables in New Jersey.”
One longtime participant, now a college graduate, put the lesson this way: “The process of care, maintenance and delayed gratification has proved to be extremely useful throughout my life. Athletics, academics, relationships and career environments all have their parallels to
the garden. In addition, the process of community cultivation has made me feel more rooted, no pun intended.”
That is a lot for a garden to do. But it’s also exactly what gardens do. Jennifer Spiegler, whose family has participated for more than 16 years, describes the program as unusually
welcoming. “Monika leads a program that allows for everyone to participate, whether with dirt, seeds, math skills, eating veggies or playing with a hose. Anyone who joins for one session comes back for more,” she says.
“Life lessons and skills learned are way more than gardening.”
Another longtime participant said the program “sparked my curiosity for nature at such a young age” and offered a “messy and fun space” for weekly adventure. But, the participant added, it also fills “a critical void of fresh food in local food pantries,” making it part of the community’s promise to care for one another.
The Maplewood Garden Club makes much of this possible. Its annual plant sale, the club’s biggest and only fundraiser, supports the Youth Gardening Program by helping pay for seeds, growing supplies, planting activities and educational tools for the MapleFood garden. Proceeds also support town beautification projects, sustainability efforts such as the rain garden at Hilton Library, community service programs, horticultural therapy, the herb garden at Durand-Hedden and monthly educational workshops at The Woodland.
Participants often leave the garden with more than dirty sneakers. They take home seeds, seedlings, vegetables and instructions for building raised beds with low-cost materials. They also take home a better 15understanding of where food comes from and why freshly harvested vegetables taste different from the ones that have spent days traveling to a grocery store shelf.
A radish can be spicy. A tomato picked at the right time can help a child understand summer. Soil is not just dirt. A hose is both a tool and, occasionally, a source of entertainment.
The program is practical in the best way. It teaches children how to plant, tend, harvest and share. It lets them see that food takes time and that not every seed does what you hoped. It also shows them that their effort can matter to someone beyond their own family.
In a town full of busy weekends and overscheduled calendars, the Maplewood Youth Gardening Program offers something refreshingly simple: a place to show up, get dirty, learn something and leave a little more connected than when you arrived. To join the program, email Hannemann at youthgarden@maplewoodgardenclub.org.
Adrianna Donat is a Maplewood-based writer and real estate agent with Pollock Properties Group, helping people find neighborhoods, homes and, when we get lucky, enough sunlight for tomato plants.
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