Geneva Community Garden’s Stewards Keep Green Thumbs Growing

Jeanne Depman and Steve Indig are two green thumbs who care for the Geneva Community Garden.

The San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department opened the gardening-centered open space in 2018, nearly a decade after Martha Arnaud, who Depman and Indig deemed the garden’s pillar, applied for grant funds in 2009. Now, its 60 plots are filled by San Francisco residents with an ever-growing waitlist. Depman said there has been some turnover with new gardeners joining, some of whom had been on the waitlist since 2021.

“It’s its own gem in this neighborhood district,” Indig said. “We're sorry that it isn't available to everybody, really, but there is a wait list if people want to get on it. We're grateful that it's here and the people in the community who are able to take advantage of it.”

Depman and her husband, Shawn Heiser, have been with the garden since the beginning, while Indig and his wife, Anna Indig, joined in 2020 after being on the waitlist. Both currently serve as the sole members of the garden’s steering committee, keeping a keen eye on the garden, delegating maintenance tasks like taking the Recology bins to the curb and hosting community workday events.

“It's such a nice space for people to come together. You feel proud of what you’re growing, and when the garden’s all nice and cleaned up like after a work day, you feel such good progress,” Depman said.

The Ingleside Light met with the pair to hear what it’s like to run a community garden.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get into gardening, and what are you currently growing?

Indig: I've incredibly casually just wanted to grow things in whatever dirt plot that I might have wherever I'm living, maybe something that I can eat. I am not an experienced gardener, and that's one of the things when I was asked to be on the steering committee. I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t help anybody with their gardening, which is still kind of the case. It’s not like going to my backyard. It’s about a 10-minute walk for me to come over here, and I’m not here every day — sometimes not every week — but I’m trying to grow things that we’ll enjoy, that we can take home, some things to eat. I’ve done flowers a little bit too. Where our plots are at, at the top of the garden, you look down and you can see over these houses and you can see toward the Daly City hills and McLaren Park, and it’s pretty pleasant.

I’m currently growing a couple of different kinds of lettuce, some kind of flower. We usually go down to the Flowercraft on Bayshore, across from Lowe’s, and just see what’s in season. The people there are very helpful, so we’ll bring stuff up and try it. Our favorite thing, I have to mention it, and I haven’t seen it again at least there, is broccoli romanesco. It is really unique looking. It doesn’t look like normal broccoli. It’s more like a cauliflower head, but it’s got a very interesting geometric shape to it.

Depman: It was actually Sean who had seen the notice about “hey, sign up and get a plot,” and I was on board with that. I’m certainly no master gardener, but have been experimenting with the flowers. We have a lot of poppies, which are just so easy. We’ve tried a variety of vegetables, tomatoes and lettuces. We’ve got chives and some herbs. We did mint one time. That’s what’s going on in our plot.

What does a typical day in the garden look like?

Depman: It's pretty quiet, I would say, in my experience. Sometimes there'll be maybe another couple of gardeners in here, but it's relatively quiet when you just come individually to go work in your plot. Definitely water it, pull some weeds. I look at other plots. I look and see how all the other gardeners are doing. On the work days that we have, which are these two-hour scheduled work days, we'll get 10 to 15 gardeners in and everybody working on trimming and like Steve was saying, cleaning up the common areas and that's just a different look when we're in the garden because it's really cool to see everybody working together.

Indig: I look forward to coming down when I think that it's time that I can pick something to take home, but that's not always. It's a little bit of a routine. We keep you know the gate secured so I come in and unlock the gate and go into the shed and get the hose and go up and hook up the hose and i'll at least have some kind of a bag and maybe scissors or something to do the trimming to bring stuff and with a tool that I'll bring from home or that I'll borrow from here, do weeding. As Jean said, I’ll take a look around. I'm the one who communicates with the people to take out the green bins, so depending on what day of the week, I'll come and take a look. Have they been taken out? And just do some double-checking on things like that.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to get into gardening?

Indig: Ask questions at your nursery. That's helped me.

Depman: And see what grows in the area. You’re right, it leads to questions about the nursery, but what are the plants that grow in our climate?