Aug 13, 2025 —
The Inlet Community Garden. Photo: Amy Feiereisel
This story is part of NCPR’s ongoing volunteerism series, which highlights the work that volunteers are doing all over our region.
Inlet’s old school building has white clapboards and a red roof, and it sits right on Route 28, close to the downtown drag.
From the road, you can’t see much. But if you walk behind the school, you’ll see a big fenced-in garden area, dotted with about two dozen raised garden beds bursting with life.
“A lot of the gardeners were a little ambitious [this year],” laughed 44-year-old Stephen Cole. “Look at some of these tomato plants! They’re eight feet tall. It’s insane.”
Cole is a board member of the Inlet Area Community Taskforce, a local not-for-profit that officially came together in 2022. It works on clean energy, community, and food security projects in Inlet, a small Adirondack community with a year-round population of about 330 people.
The community garden that’s now flourishing behind the old school building has been Cole’s passion project for years now. He’s turned the community’s former K-6 school into a hub of community, family, and fresh food.
Cole built most of the garden beds, borrowed a tractor to lay out wood chips, and he’s invested a lot of time into making gardeners’ beds a success.
Stephen Cole. Photo: Amy Feiereisel
Cole said this location—a south-facing sunny field bordering Fifth Lake—is a rarity in these parts.
“If you can’t tell, we’re really good at growing rocks and trees in the Adirondacks, and there’s not a lot of gardens around this area!”
There’s a lot more sun here than can be found in most people’s yards. “Eight AM to eight PM basically every day. It’s one of the sunniest places that I have ever found in this area,” said Cole.
We entered the garden through a break in two layers of snow fencing and netting. The raised garden beds are set in rows with wide aisles between them, covered in wood chips. There’s a communal tool shed and a retractable house for watering.
From an idea to dozens of beds
The garden looks like it’s been here forever, but this is actually its third official season, and it’s been growing fast. In 2023, there were just a couple of beds. In 2024, there were ten. This year, there are 24 in the main garden, and six in a smaller fenced-in area closer to the road.
Cole is quick to say this wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the entire Inlet Area Community Taskforce, and other community members and organizations. The dirt filling the beds all came from the town transfer station, which has a compost pile.
“So they donated all that, and then Dan Levy, who his family owned Levy Lumber, he donated all the wood chips,” explained Cole.
“He actually helped me lay the landscaping tarp, and a couple of other volunteers helped me put up all the snow fencing around here to keep the deer out. It’s a community project, a town project, really.”
But the one driving it all forward has been Cole, who has dedicated countless hours to the project since 2019, when the Inlet Common School became a non-operating district after a vote in March of 2019.
The community started thinking about how to use the building and grounds, and Cole had a lot of passion for building a community garden.
Stephen Cole working on building the Inlet Community Garden in 2022. Photo provided
Cole grew up in Missouri, where his family had a big garden. He said that for much of his adult life, he dreamt about gardening again, but that was difficult where he was living, in places like Boston, Barcelona, and Chicago.
That’s where Cole was from roughly 2006 until 2016. He ran wine bars in the city, and his partner Carrie was a wine buyer for Whole Foods. They moved to Inlet in 2016, to take over the local wine store with some partners.
Upon arrival, Cole was surprised to find that food gardens weren’t really part of the local culture, and there was certainly no community garden.
“So many people that are locals here that came on over [to visit the garden] just had never heard of a community garden!” he said.
So he started one, and he said he was delighted by how supportive the community was.
“I don’t know if I could have done this in Chicago,” said Cole. “I may have, but definitely moving to a smaller community like Inlet made me realize that you can do just about anything. Just one person can do so much.”
Creating more local food access
Cole said it’s not uncommon for residents of Inlet to drive down to the nearest Walmart, in Utica, to do their grocery shopping.
He said building the community garden was a small way of creating more local food access.
With some prodding, Cole showed me his garden bed, which was filled with basil plants and green zebra tomatoes, Cole’s favorite varietal. “If you’ve never had them, they’re quite delicious. You eat them like an apple, and just a little salt and pepper really brings out the flavor.”
Alicia Kress and her son Ryker, in front of their garden bed at the Inlet Community Garden. Photo: Amy Feiereisel
Working a few rows over was 32-year-old Alicia Kress, who grew up here in Inlet. She was harvesting vegetables with her 4-year-old son, Ryker. They’d just finished weeding and harvesting some yellow squash.
This is the Kresses first year with a community garden bed. Alicia said it’s working really well for them, since they don’t have much sun at home, and the garden bed and fencing were already set up.
“It’s been really fun watching the kids be excited about it,” said Kress. “I have three children and two of them love coming and checking on them and then eating vegetables…they’ll come down and they’ll eat peas the whole time.”
She said being here is about time in the sun with her kids and showing them where food comes from. Plus, it’s really affordable: a bed is $25 for the season.
Kress explained that they grew all their plants from pre-assembled seed kits that Cole put together this spring, from donated seeds.
“The whole program was basically if anybody wanted to be a part of it, I will give you any seeds you want, I’ll give you the dirt, give you the trays, you take them home with you and grow them,” said Cole. Next year, he’s hoping to start a plant swap between gardeners.
Kress kids snacking on peas from their garden bed. Photo provided
Turning the former school into a food hub
There’s a lot of “food stuff” going on at the former school, and it extends beyond the community garden.
Last summer, the Inlet Area Community Task Force invited Elizabeth Banks, from Banks Farm in Boonville, to set up a weekly stand in the school parking lot.
Now they’re there every Tuesday, year-round, selling vegetables and pasture-raised meat and eggs. Cole said there’s hunger here for local food.
“The first year she did more in sales here than she did at the Utica or Boonville farmer’s markets combined,” he said.
Inside the school, Cole and other volunteers are playing around with hydroponic towers. Some are in a sunny room on the first floor, while others are in a cooler room in the basement.
“Every 45 minutes or so, the pump will kick on and pump the water all the way to the top, and that will drain down through all the plants,” he said. “We do strawberries year-round, we do herbs, one of our big focuses is lettuces.”
Now that they’ve got the hang of the towers, Cole wants to make them available to interested gardeners in the winter.
“One family will have their own grow tower. So I’m going to teach them how to test nutrients, test for pH, teach them how they operate,” he said.
The Inlet Community Garden. Photo: Amy Feiereisel
Cole has a lot of plans for the future. He said they’re planning to add six more garden beds, and will start fundraising soon to install an 8-foot-tall, chain-link deer fence.
But the garden is also starting to take a life of its own, which he loves.
“We have an amazing group of gardeners this year,” said Cole. “By themselves, they started an e-mail chain, a phone chain. If somebody is out of town, somebody else will step in and like water the garden…I was so happy. It was just like being a proud parent.”
Cole shies away from praise and can’t really say what motivates him.
Though, he said that he loves gardens, and he likes making other people happy.
“If it was something I could put together for everybody else to enjoy as much as I was going to enjoy it, yeah, it was a no brainer for me,” he said.
Inlet Community Garden. Photo: Amy Feiereisel
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