HOLLYWOOD — There are nine-year waits in this city for a lot of things, and one of them is a place to grow zucchini.
The Fountain Avenue Community Garden has forty-eight plots, a locked tool shed, a compost operation run with municipal seriousness, and a waiting list that has passed two hundred names. The coordinators, who keep it on a laminated sheet, put the current wait at about nine years.
Plots rarely open, which is the trouble. Gardeners do not so much give them up as pass them on — an aunt to a niece, a retiring neighbor to the friend who watered for her. A plot changing hands through the official list, rather than the unofficial one, is rare enough that longtime members treat it as news.
“A plot coming free is the closest thing we have to an obituary,” said Perpetua Adeyemi, who has run the garden for eleven years and took over the sheet from a man who ran it for twenty. “Usually because it is one.”
The garden’s internal life is denser than its acreage suggests. There is a compost committee, which meets, and keeps minutes. There is a rule, adopted after debate and one shouted meeting, that tomato cages may not exceed a neighbor’s fence line. And there is the fig tree on plot 22, which for six summers has dropped ripe fruit onto plot 23, where it lands, ferments, and draws what the tenant of plot 23 describes in writing, at meetings, as “an unacceptable volume of wasps.”
The tenant of plot 22 says the tree was there first. The bylaws are silent on figs.
For those on the outside, the wait has a way of measuring their lives. Noor Haddad added her name in 2017, when her son rode along to the garden in a stroller to watch other people’s vegetables. “He has a learner’s permit now,” she said. “He is not interested in the garden. I am still on the list.”
The coordinators field a steady trade in schemes to move up it. People offer to volunteer, to donate, to take the worst plot, the shadiest one, the one by the gate that floods each January. Adeyemi hears them out and explains, gently, that the list is the list.
Asked whether there was truly no way to jump it, she considered the question with the patience of someone who has answered it many times.
“There’s one,” she said. “Outlive somebody.”