ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605280053
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B7 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RESTON
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
As a new growing season begins, some community gardeners are fortifying more than their soil - they're securing locks and chains, and raising fences around their plots.
Last summer, Pat Grebe tried to catch the thieves stealing vegetables from her community plot at Baron Cameron Park. Hiding in the bushes, Grebe snapped pictures of a fellow gardener helping herself to someone else's mint, and had the woman and her husband evicted.
But the plot thickens. Grebe's garden was raided again in the fall.
``It started all over again, although this time it was worse than before,'' she said. ``They dug up my dahlias. They dug up my herb plants. They even dug up someone's rosebushes.
``This year, instead of a fence, I wanted to put land mines in,'' she said.
As waiting lists for garden plots in the metropolitan area grow by the hundreds, a new kind of crime has cropped up: plant-napping.
Jim Dewing, gardening coordinator for the Fairfax County park system for the last 10 years, said the number of missing-vegetable reports keeps climbing.
``They'll call saying, `Somebody cleaned out my tomatoes or dug up all my potatoes or picked all my peas,''' Dewing said. ``I'm sure there are few things that anger you more than getting ready to harvest and seeing your garden stripped clean.''
In Fairfax, community gardening is one of the best deals around: $30 a year to rent some of the most expensive real estate in the nation. Most people cultivate their 20-by-30-foot plots as a hobby but some others rely on them for their main source of food.
After many of Baron Cameron Park's 32 plots were raided last year, Dewing tightened the gardening rules with warnings that ``renters may not trespass on, pick vegetables from, or otherwise affect, alter or disturb other garden plots.''
Mesh fences, previously used to keep out animal trespassers, were boosted to the human height of up to 6 feet. Other security measures have been taken, including installing stronger chains.
Athena McCorkle, who recently took over Dewing's coordinator job, said an informal ``garden watch'' has sprouted up throughout Fairfax. Gardeners call her to report sightings of strangers in their neighbors' plots.
Some gardeners at the Reston park recalled that one of the victims last year was an elderly man who donates his vegetables to a local fire station. He lost his giant zucchini, which he had planned to enter in a contest.
``I came out that morning and he was really brokenhearted,'' said Mark Wayt, a construction worker who drives to Reston from Loudoun County. ``It was pumpkin-size.''
``More like a watermelon,'' said his wife, Donna Wayt.
Paul Kovalski, who landed a plot in the Woodburn community garden in Annandale after two years on the waiting list, said neighbors already have warned him about vegetable marauders.
``That's one of my fears. But if people are that desperate, they can have it,'' he said.
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