12 / matters magazine / summer 2026
O
n a Saturday afternoon 
in 
Maplewood, 
the 
MapleFood 
Garden 
in the greenhouses be­
hind Maplewood Town 
Hall has the pleasant, 
slightly chaotic, feel of 
a place where real work is getting done by people 
who are not too worried about staying clean.
There are kids crouched over the beds, looking 
for worms and roly-polies with the seriousness of 
scientists and the joy of kids playing in the dirt. 
There are seedlings to move, seeds to tuck into the 
soil, labels to write and weeds to pull before they 
get too comfortable. It smells like well-composted 
earth. Someone is usually excited to use the hose. 
Someone is usually delighted by what they have 
found underground.
This is the Maplewood Youth Gardening Pro­
gram, run by Monika Hannemann, a Columbia 
High School ninth-grade biology teacher, long­
time horticulturist and enthusiastic translator of 
the natural world. Hannemann has led the pro­
gram since 2010, long enough that some of the 
children who once showed up with small hands 
and big curiosity are now adults who can talk 
about the garden as a place that helped shape how 
they understand work and community.
The program began as a collaboration between 
the Maplewood Garden Club and YouthNet, the 
community service organization that works with 
Maplewood Middle School and South Orange 
Middle School to provide academic support and 
enrichment activities. It eventually became part 
of the Maplewood Garden Club’s Youth Garden 
Program, open not only to YouthNet students but 
to the broader community. The Youth Garden is 
geared toward 
children ages 
3 to 18 and 
their families.
Today, 89 
families are on 
the program 
list. 
Before 
each session, 
Hannemann sends an email with the week’s plan 
and asks families to RSVP. She caps participation 
at 20 people, a number that keeps the garden 
from becoming too crowded and gives each child 
a chance to do more than watch from the edge.
A typical session begins with a walk through the 
garden to see, as Hannemann likes to say, “what’s 
growing on.” The group checks what has sprouted, 
what has changed, what is ready to harvest and 
what needs attention. Then they break into rotat­
ing jobs: weeding, planting seeds, transplanting 
seedlings, labeling, watering and whatever else the 
season requires.
“We end the program with watering the en­
tire garden and sometimes the gardeners, too,” 
Hannemann says.
Before moving to Maplewood, Hannemann 
spent 11 years as a professional horticulturist and 
educator at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. When her 
husband, Jim, accepted a teaching position at 
Fairleigh Dickinson University, a colleague sug­
gested Maplewood. The town had train access, 
but just as important, he told her, it had an excel­
Where Curiosity Grows
Inside the Maplewood Youth Gardening Program
BY ADRIANNA DONAT
Each garden plot has a clipboard 
showing the location of the plants. 
Photo by Julia Maloof Verderosa.
L to R: Eden Prager holds freshly-picked spinach, Ameer Azma is getting ready to plant an eggplant seedling and Annelise Salierno with harvested 
radishes. Photos by Julia Maloof Verderosa.

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