The Garden at 485 Elm
People growing together:
A collaborative community garden in Montpelier, Vermont

Welcome to The Garden!

Planting Garlic in 2023 to Harvest in 2024

Planting Garlic in 2023 to Harvest in 2024

Once Vermont is well into fall frosts, it's garlic planting time. Waiting until extended warm spells have ended ensures the garlic won't germinate and begin growing until spring. Flashback to midsummer: We harvested the garlic planted in 2022 and reserved hundreds of...

read more

What else is growing at the garden?

Early Planting Accomplished

Early Planting Accomplished

We've planted all our early crops, the ones that can go in while there's still threat of frost: Beets Carrots Kale & Other Leafy Greens Peas Salad Greens Summer squash We're looking forward to June, when we'll plant tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, hot peppers,...

read more
Planting Onion Seedlings

Planting Onion Seedlings

By the Ides of May, we've planted the onion bed, carrots, summer squash, peas, and massive messes of greens. There's much more still to plant as the season warms: Beets, pole beans, bush beans, flowers for cutting, and, of course, tomatoes.

read more
“Water the earth, not the air”

“Water the earth, not the air”

"Water roots, not leaves." "Water the earth, not the air. " These are some of the many lessons we learned from our first garden coordinator in 2014. Here are scenes from this year's watering orientation. /

read more
Early Herb Walk

Early Herb Walk

Clinical herbalist and Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism student Diana Baron led us in and around the garden to identify the plants just poking out of the earth as we begin the 2018 gardening season. We took this herb stroll on April 21, a week before our first...

read more
Day In The Dirt!

Day In The Dirt!

Gardeners dug, shaped, and planted at the first work party of the Garden at 485 Elm. Our seventeen volunteers joined hundreds of others at 33 community and school gardens all over the state participating in Day In The Dirt. This was the sixth annual Day In The Dirt,...

read more
Winter gardening for real

Winter gardening for real

Mulching some of the beds was that one last chore we didn't get to before the snow flew. On January 10, an intrepid gardener went out on her own to complete it. We weren't even sure the garden gates would open with so much snow piled on each side. But Meredith found...

read more
Tucking the Garden in for Winter

Tucking the Garden in for Winter

Most of our crops have been harvested. Just a few hardy greens and Brussels sprouts remain. We've tested and amended the soil and planted winter cover crops for nutrient replenishment. But we're not quite done. Nature doesn't tend to leave bare earth. We mimic that...

read more