Headline: Shiloh Field Community Garden continues to grow to meet need
Subhead: The largest community garden in the United States is run entirely by volunteers who believe in feeding the hungry
By John Anderson
The crowing of chickens is the first sound that breaks the cool morning silence of the garden. Even before the sun has fully broken over the tall wall of trees that surrounds the property with its warm golden light that slowly spreads across the rows of vegetables and fields waiting to be harvested.
The next sound is the large metal gate being unlocked and cars driving down the worn gravel road, kicking up tiny pebbles as they go. These are the sounds of the volunteers who keep the garden alive. Most of them are retired, and very few of them had any gardening experience before beginning to volunteer. But they show up as the sun rises nearly every day of the week because they believe in one idea: feeding the hungry.
“Our mission is that we want to assist anyone with food insecurities,” said Tim Sutton, garden administrator and chair of the garden committee. “And specifically in Denton, not having anyone go hungry.”
The garden was founded in 2011 by a local named Gene Gumfory, who felt called by God to literally feed his people. Around the time Gumfory first felt this calling, a large section of land had been donated to Denton Bible Church, and they had no plans for how to use it effectively. After meeting with Gumfory, they agreed to let him turn it into a community garden. The garden has reportedly donated over 340,000 pounds of food since opening.
As the garden grew and administration and upkeep became a bigger concern, the volunteers banded together to form the Friends of Shiloh Garden nonprofit and officially leased the land from the church, as well as managing funding and logistics.
Currently, Shiloh Field is the largest community garden in the nation. But without any paid staff, consistent funding or other amenities, it can be hard for the gardeners to keep up with the growing demand for their produce.
“We're limited to some extent because we don't have electricity out here,” Sutton said. “We're nonprofit, so everything that we get as far as a revenue source is all based on private donations and any grants that we can get. And so sometimes that makes it a little difficult, because gardening and farming is not cheap.”
In 2023, the garden nearly shut down due to the high cost of water and the lack of funding it had received. Crop production and volunteers were both scaled back to avoid shutting down completely. Garden Manager Dean Urbanek, the only paid member of the organization and an old friend of Gumfory, was asked to retire.
Sutton said that although things are no longer that dire, they still rely on the generosity of others and the connections that their board members have to stay operational.
“We were in need of what's called a potato harvester,” Sutton said. “We had about an acre full of potatoes, it would have taken us months to manually go through and dig the potatoes out to harvest. So this potato harvester, it was about $3,500 and our funds were kind of low. And I was like, ‘What are we going to do?’ And so I talked to Texas Medical City, and they gave us the money for that.”
Sutton said they harvested 4500 pounds of potatoes in 3 weeks due to the harvester, saving important time and sparing their volunteers from having to do the manual labor.
Without volunteers to use the machinery or harvest the crops, the garden sees produce losses due to rot or insects and animals. Sutton said this is another area in which the community often steps up to help.
“The University of North Texas has been awesome to send out students,” Sutton said. “We had the UNT Track and Field folks out here, probably about 100 or 120 students, so that was great.”
The garden donates to local food pantries like the ones at Texas Woman’s University and Denton High School, as well as shelters like Our Daily Bread and many other food banks in Denton.
After calling and coordinating which shelters or food banks want what specific types of items, volunteers from Shiloh wash and weigh the produce before boxing it up and delivering it right to whichever location needs it.
While after 14 years the main goal of the garden does remain on feeding the hungry, Sutton said another benefit of Shiloh is the community that the volunteers are able to build there.
“We not only providing the food for people,” Sutton said. “But also providing a community within Shiloh that we're all working together to help each other. And so it's kind of great, because you make a whole new group of friends.”
Besides its goals of feeding Denton’s hungry and creating community among those who volunteer there, the garden also allows locals to plant and tend their own individual 15 by 15 foot plots free of charge. To receive a plot, the only requirement is keeping the area tidy and putting in a few volunteer hours to help the garden.
Like Sutton, many of the current volunteers started as gardening novices who were interested in an individual plot before becoming more involved with the garden and its continuing message of helping the community.
“One of the benefits of the individual plots out here at one time, a long time ago, was that there were older folks out here that I learned a lot from them, just listening and kind of figuring things out,” Sutton said.
While a lot of the volunteers had no background in farming before beginning to work at the garden, volunteers like Michael Tooley, a former computer engineer and United States Marine Veteran, brought knowledge from previous farming experiences and helped the others.
“And so you just learn from everybody else, Sutton said. “And just unfortunately in gardening, you're at the mercy of the weather and pests and mother nature and and so you just do the best you can and hope for the best.”
While crop production is slowing down as the seasons get colder, the garden plans to continue growing cold-weather crops like peppers for as long as they can before it is time to plant the budding seedlings they have in their plastic greenhouse tunnels. In response to a growing demand, the garden also plans to plant fruit trees in the spring to increase its offerings.