Meghna Chakrabarti from Radio Boston stopped by my garden the other day for a chat.  She was doing a piece for WBUR about the Fenway Victory Gardens, and asked me about the legendary wait list. 

She says in the piece that "Boston residents often wait five years for their patch of earth"!

Although I reassured her the wait wasn't nearly as long as legend has it, that part didn't make it into the piece. 

There are a lot of factors involved, of course, but I applied for a plot back in the autumn of '04, and was digging in the dirt in Spring of '05.  Seemed pretty reasonable to me, especially since I, too, had heard about the years-long list.

I suspect that part of the problem in years long-past (where the legend of the five-year wait has its roots) was that the board members charged with going through applications, contacting gardeners, and divvying plots were shirking.  Simple as that.  Since I've been a member, at least, I think the wait has shortened significantly.

The persistence of the wait list myth is probably partly due to the air of exclusivity it gives us. It suggests a hardened, elite corps of master gardeners joining the storied ranks of which is a high honor.  I will neither confirm nor deny reports of hazing.

FGS President Tim Horn is obviously promoting this view in comments on the piece on Radio Boston's website when, after a little plug, he concludes: "Certainly not the place to go if you do not want to brush with rif raf [sic]."

You just can't buy that kind of advertising.

Our wait list just grew by at least three or four hundred names, I'm sure. 

In all fairness, Tim seems to have been responding to the first comment on the piece, from "John", who wrote: "Many of the gardens are awful. Flowers are jammed into the lots, oldlawn furniture, tacky flags, etc." 

Whatevah.

Dude's an obvious wait-lister.

There are always things we could do better, and the way we recruit folks who are fired up about community gardening is one of them.  A good first step would be to dispense with the myth of the five-year wait list. 

It's obviously not long enough to keep the riffraff out.