At the historic Ross Farm at 135 North Maple Avenue in Basking Ridge, NJ, our vegetable and flower gardens and apiary are a vibrant testament to the natural beauty and bountiful spirit of the estate. The garden donates fresh produce to several local organizations that help those in need, including the Somerset County Food Bank, Community Hope at the Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center in Lyons, and God’s Co-Op Pantry at the Basking Ridge Presbyterian Church.
Since 2015, Boudinot’s Giving Garden has been a hub of volunteerism in the community. Students seeking community service hours, interested teenagers, Scouting groups and Eagle Scout projects, parents with their young children, working adults, and senior citizens who have the time and desire to give back to the community in a meaningful way are led by the indefatigable Basking Ridge resident Jan Williams, a board member of the Friends of the Boudinot-Southard-Ross Estate (FoBSR) and the garden leader from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge.
Leadership teams from FoBSR and a consortium of churches, including St. Bernard’s and St. John on the Mountain in Bernardsville and St. Mark’s, plan and manage the garden. They also meet with volunteers several times a week to prepare the garden beds, plant, weed, harvest, and perform all the necessary tasks to grow vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Then these same volunteers transport the beautiful, nutritious, and delicious results to the grateful recipients. Labor-intensive improvements, such as expanding new beds, performing maintenance like weed control, and making repairs to fencing or the ingenious irrigation system designed and built by a FoBSR Board member, are all undertaken by smiling volunteers. Additionally, the back-breaking wheelbarrowing of fresh topsoil, mulch, or woodchips is also a part of their efforts.
The newest addition to the Giving Garden, besides expanded planting beds, is the apiary, which produces a significant quantity of wonderful raw local honey. Local neighbor John Lyga is responsible for its development, harvesting the honey, training volunteers, and educating visitors as to the importance of pollinators. Money raised from the sale of honey jars is “plowed” back into the garden operation in the form of seeds, hardscape, tools, supplies, and a small greenhouse to get young seedlings started. Annuals planted around the garden fence serve to nourish the pollinators, but also add stunning bonus beauty to the site. The garden volunteers practice organic gardening, using only natural items to fertilize and control critters and insects. The crew also composts its own gardening waste and benefits from prior Eagle Scout projects that provided the composting beds as well as an essential garden shed.
In the center of the garden is a “historic bed” circled by logs hewn from a fallen tree on the property. This bed grows herbs that would have been found in New Jersey in earlier days. There is a strong partnership with volunteers from the Wick Garden at the Jockey Hollow portion of the Morristown National Historic Park for providing plantings for the historic bed.
“It’s
a magnificent place” are words heard often from visitors seeing the garden in its blooming glory. Williams and her volunteers beautify other parts of the property, tending the houses’ window boxes, planting sunflowers on top of the stone wall and near the house, adding plants around the flagpole, and even getting additional harvest results from cherry tomatoes and pumpkins in front of the house.
The Friends of the Boudinot-Southard-Ross Estate would be remiss not to thank our friends at the Somerset County Park Commission for their support of this important mission of feeding those in need. Over the years, Bernards Township DPW, and local businesses such as Great Swamp Greenhouses, Back to Nature Home and Garden, The Farm at Green Village, Keiling Tree Service, and Countrymile Garden have generously discounted or gifted supplies such as high-quality topsoil, mulch, or chips.
The generosity of materials and, most of all, the thousands of hours of volunteered time have had profound effects. Well over 30,000 pounds of lettuces, Brussels sprouts, carrots, zucchini, onions, squash, muskmelons, beans, peppers, tomatoes, beets, radishes, tomatillos, zucchinis, asparagus, squash, garlic, herbs, and honey have been harvested and transported to those in need to date!