At Riverside Press Park, the garden has a new steward and a public kitchen

Every Sunday afternoon at Riverside Press Park, a group of local volunteers gathers to work in the garden. They begin by harvesting vegetables, then they spray diseased plants with a natural pesticide. They water over 20 raised garden beds before picking fresh flowers and weeding. The workday ends with planting new seeds.

Afterwards, they enjoy the fruits of their labor. As the sun dips low on the Charles River, volunteers gather around a tarp-shaded work table to wash, peel, and slice their harvest. Sometimes it’s zucchini, which gets wrapped into hand rolls, other times it’s leafy greens that get tossed into a salad. Friends and neighbors come in and out of the garden, which is bordered by an unlocked chain link fence. Food is passed around on plates without any formality.

It might look like a picnic, but ask any volunteer, and it’s more than that. It’s a new partnership between a group of community organizers and the city of Cambridge called Public Kitchen.

It probably doesn’t look like any kitchen you’d find in the city. There is a wash station, and an electric hookup to run a rice cooker, instant pot or an air fryer, but no stove or oven. Although the food is a draw, it’s not the focus; relationships are.

According to volunteers, cooking at Public Kitchen explores how community life might change if kitchens were as available as public libraries and schools. The project launched as a seasonal pop-up in 2024 at a small storefront in Dorchester’s Upham’s Corner run by the Design Studio for Social Intervention, a group that applies design thinking to social justice work. That’s where Somerville resident Delta Brandon encountered the idea of community when they first moved to Boston.

“The idea of a ‘third place’ gets kicked around a lot,” said Brandon, describing the concept of a shared space outside of home and work, like a cafe or a park. But increasingly those types of spaces feel like “another place to go be lonely.”

Gathering three days a week for shared cooking at the Public Kitchen in Dorchester felt like an antidote to urban isolation.

“Imagine the big family holiday meal gathering that you always wished you had, but with people who live in your neighborhood,” Brandon said. “You walk in and people say, ‘ahh you’re here!’ You get tossed a cutting board and knife. You get to work and have easy conversations because you’re working alongside each other. Before you know it, it’s ‘see you next week.’”

“So many organizing spaces talk about community, it’s borderline a buzzword,” they said. “Public Kitchen made me think this is the meat on the bone; this is the real deal.”

When the pop-up Public Kitchen in Dorchester ended in fall of 2024, Brandon began searching for places that might be able to host a similar gathering.

Growing pains at Riverside Press Park

While Public Kitchen was cooking up community meals in Dorchester, the city of Cambridge was trying to figure out what to do with the community garden at Riverside Press Park.

When the garden was established in 2012, residents were eager to plant on their own plots. But by the 2020s, . Although Riverside Press Park’s garden was not the only location facing these challenges, fewer residents wanted to plant there. And despite the growing desire for individual garden plots, the city says the space became underutilized and neglected.

“Do we just keep creating plots?” thought Jennifer Letourneau, the director of Cambridge’s Conservation Commission, which manages the city’s community gardens. “[We thought] maybe there’s another way. What are the boundaries to gardening? [In Cambridge], the boundaries to gardening are waiting for your turn to get a plot available to you. So, what if we removed that boundary completely and just had communal gardening space?”

So the city did just that. It partnered with the educational nonprofit Green Cambridge to steward the space in 2022 for youth programs. But the group, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, struggled with “low engagement and difficulty updating the garden,” said Cambridge’s community garden coordinator, Sara Schneidman.

Green Cambridge left Riverside after the 2025 growing season.

Bringing a kitchen to the garden

This spring, as the 2026 season approached, Cambridge sought another partner who might “test the waters,” said Schneidman.

The city reached out to CitySprouts, a local non-profit that does garden education. And through their contacts, they met Brandon, who had been searching for a place to expand Public Kitchen closer to their home in Somerville.

Brandon was prepared with questions about permits, wastewater disposal, open flames and tents. So much so that the idea of supporting a communal kitchen, and a garden to stock it, came easy to the city.

The city would allow Brandon and their fellow volunteers to plant in as many garden beds as they could handle, providing them with a $300 Home Depot gift card and a lock box for supplies.

“There was no concern on our end about the risk we were taking,” said Schneidman. “We were excited to add this new dimension to our [garden] program.”

Within Brandon’s social circles, it almost felt too good to be true – like the city had gifted them a space to realize their dreams.

“My roommates, friends, and fellow co-organizers have always talked about the ’one day, when we have the co-op in Vermont, we’re gonna farm together’ pipe dream,” said Cambridge resident Sophia Fortunato, a friend of Brandon’s who now organizes the garden’s volunteers. “That [dream] got to be realized in a different way earlier than we expected.”

In May, 5-10 volunteers across multiple organizations and friend groups began meeting at the garden on Sundays.

They were guided by Maddie Kartoz, who connected city officials with Brandon and now manages the garden at Riverside.

Preparing the garden for growing was a big task. For starters, it was overrun with weeds. And some of the raised garden beds had rotted corners, which had become a gateway for rats. Addressing these things is typically done before the growing season and starting in May meant the team was already weeks behind the typical schedule.

Kartoz, who operates gardens in local schools for CitySprouts and has a personal plot in Allston, knew this. And yet, there was a mission behind cleaning up Riverside that felt important to meet anyway.

“I garden for my job, and I also have a community garden plot, so I don’t need to do more gardening in my life,” said Kartoz. “What I need more of is places, people, and systems … that invite new ways of being, working and of connecting to each other.”

Volunteers take root

Despite the late start and a shoestring budget, volunteers began weeding and fixing what they could. And as they began planting into the garden, they ran into challenges that people in the space have struggled with for years.

A few Riverside residents had continued planting in the garden beds, flying under the radar of the city. Some were initially confused about the new activity in the garden. And some, who had been burned by previous experiences in community gardens, were also skeptical.

One of those residents is Blew Bear, a Cambridge native who grows native plants and herbs like dill, which are common in her Cambodian culinary traditions. Bear said she’s seen a lot of gardeners come and go in the space, and that she had plants uprooted by others who thought they were weeds.

“You can’t just grow plants out here, expect them to be fine and … come back whenever you want and enjoy the fruits of your labor,” she said of past gardeners she has encountered. “You really have to be out here, day after day, watering, weeding, tending. That’s the reason why it hurts when you’ve been growing something for so long and a stranger takes your vegetable or fruit. All your hard work is not respected.”

In response to these concerns, the new volunteers have worked with residents like Bear to not disturb existing plots, and to offer watering services.

Brendan says the volunteers started the season with a lot of momentum to take care of the space, but they’ve learned how complicated it is to manage the different expectations people have from a public garden.

Originally Brandon and Fortunato were interested in using Riverside’s garden produce to address food insecurity, but the garden doesn’t yield enough produce to fully tackle that problem. To make the meals they cook at Public Kitchen, the volunteers at Riverside supplement the produce they harvest with ingredients they buy on their own – staples like rice, beans, tofu.

“There’s a lot of stakeholders. A lot of people think of the space as accomplishing different things in their lives,” said Brendan. “But Public Kitchen is just starting and I’m optimistic that it will tie these relationships together so people can see the benefit of caring about this space.”

Riverside remains an unlocked and unmonitored public space, like all of Cambridge’s community gardens. And although there are some neighbors who would rather see the garden return to individual plots, the city and the new volunteers say it is helpful to have a space that anyone can use without having to sign up for a years-long waitlist.

It wasn’t long ago, Bear said, that the pandemic shutdown lured more residents out to garden in Cambridge. Being in green space to “touch grass” even became something of a trend.

“I believe groups like this form most commonly during times of crisis, when people feel like there’s instability. And I think now is like one of those times, but it’s just kind of different now that people are so busy,” she said. “People have the motivation to start, but not the motivation to continue doing it long-term.”

For that reason, Bear says she is enjoying sharing the Riverside Press Park garden as long as the Public Kitchen volunteer group lasts.

“I have to set myself up for not being too hurt or disappointed [if] things dissipate,” she said.

The lessons of this experiment are not clear yet, and it’s not certain what will happen with the space after this growing season. As the garden manager, Kartoz hopes the city will continue to allow the group to steward the space, but acknowledges that more resources are needed – particularly the resource of volunteers’ time and energy. Although up to 30 volunteers overlap in the garden every Sunday, help is always needed throughout the week.

“My experience growing anywhere, has always been that the first year is the hardest,” said Kartoz.

Can Public Kitchen continue to be sustained entirely by volunteers?

The dreamer in me … says yes,” said Kartoz. “By doing it, we make it so. By having done it in the first place, we make it possible.”

Garden work days and the Public Kitchen will run at Riverside Press Park garden from 4-7 p.m. on Sundays until October 3.

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