By Ben Orcutt — Daily Staff Writer

BOYCE — Blandy Experimental Farm, home to the State Arboretum of Virginia, is now a place where in addition to looking at plants, you can actually grow them.

The brainchild of Steve Carroll, director of public programs at Blandy, the Blandy garden for the community is new this year.

"We had the garden space that hadn't been used, at least not in a year or so," says Carroll. "I've always been interested in community gardening and providing food, not only for families, but also for food banks and so on. I'm interested in the whole local fresh food movement, that whole idea. I at least considered the possibility that there would be people or groups who don't already have garden space and might like to use it."

Carroll's idea was such a success that he was swamped with requests once the announcement hit local newspapers.

"It's 4,000 square feet and we've got room for about eight groups with relatively small plots," Carroll says. "I've probably had 25 requests, so I had much more interest than I could handle.

"The whole impetus for me was to provide the garden space and really with only a couple of stipulations. First, that they take care of the plot, that they don't abandon it and they don't have their weeds moving into their neighbors' plots. And then the second was that they donate some portion of what they grow to, it could be the Lord Fairfax Area Food Bank, it could be a church's soup kitchen. I don't really care where it goes as long as it's going to people who need it."

Carroll has selected the groups for this year.

"I've got a couple church groups," he says. "I've got the Youth Development Center in Winchester. I've got a couple of families. I have the staff from one of the schools. I wanted some diversity of who was there. I didn't want all church groups or all families or any single kind of user."

It's obvious, Carroll says, that the community garden is filling a void in the area.

"It provides a need to people who are looking for a place to garden, and at least two of them said they had been willing to rent a space in town if they only could have found it," he says. "So it does satisfy that need and it gets people gardening. I'm a gardener. I'm an environmentalist and if I can get more people interested in gardening, get them outside, hands in the dirt watching the plants reach maturity, that's another objective for me."

When New York stockbroker Graham Blandy died in 1926, he left 700 acres of his 900-acre estate to the University of Virginia. According to its Web site, "Blandy Experimental Farm is a research station for the University of Virginia Department of Environmental Science."

Carroll, 56, holds a doctorate in botany from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and says that the community garden is in keeping with the mission of Blandy.

"We're in a sense a public garden," he says. "That is what we are and the research that on goes here is [of] an environmental nature. This fit my vision of that, and when I proposed it, everyone on the faculty said, 'Great idea.' So, we're in agreement that this was a good use of that space and it fits in with the overall mission of the arboretum."

Winchester resident Patrick Farris and his wife, Krista, are looking forward to planting vegetables in one of the plots at Blandy's community garden. Farris says they called Blandy as soon as the announcement came out. Farris says he and his wife will be joined in the garden by their three sons, Alexander, 7, Sebastian, 5, and Langston, 2.

"We really like the idea of growing some of our own food," Farris says, adding that he thinks they'll plant tomatoes and chilies at Blandy. "We obviously can't do it all. The chilies would be nice, but mainly what we'll put in the ground will end up being canned. We always put up between 60 and 100 cans of tomatoes every year [and] about the same quantity of peaches and apples that we get from orchards. So anything that we can grow here that we can at home, we will put in the ground."

Farris says the plot his family will work at Blandy will also help his children learn about what it takes to produce food.

"They have worked in a garden or seen us work in a garden, but this'll be a little bit of a larger space and yeah, we might grow some things here that we haven't grown at the house and that will give them the opportunity to understand why you have to weed, how to water, how not to over-water, how to keep vermin off plants and of course, the larger lesson is that you have to put a little bit of effort into growing food in order to eat," Farris says. "That it's not just a matter of always going to the grocery store and pulling something off the shelf. If you want to eat, somebody has to make effort to make food."

Carroll also is anxious to see the fruits of the community gardeners' labor.

"Oh yeah, I'm really looking forward to it," he says. "There will be people gardening from toddlers to people in their 80s and 90s. So, that's a good mix. I think it'll be a lot of fun."

Carroll says if all goes well this growing season, Blandy may consider increasing the size of the community garden next year.

"It's possible," he says. "We had so much interest, if I could convince the staff and so on to expand it, maybe that's what we need to do and that's a nice problem to have."

Blandy is located in Clarke County on U.S. 17-50, about 10 miles east of Winchester. For more information on programs, call 837-1758, or visit its Web site, www.virginia.edu/blandy.

*Contact Ben Orcutt at borcutt@nvdaily.com.