PORTLAND, Maine — Most of us are craving time outdoors and a sense of community right now.
You can find both through Maine's Master Gardeners Cooperative Extension, which is holding a huge plant sale right now.
Among other things, the sale funds 16 community gardens around Maine that are designed not just to educate, but also to feed Maine's hungry.
One of those gardens offers a swath of greenery amid the concrete jungle of downtown Portland.
When master gardener Sally Wright first arrived at the garden she said it was full of trash, but "now it's full of potatoes and beets and spinach and flowers."
"It's an open pick garden," Wright said. "It's open to anyone."
The garden is located in Portland's East Bayside, a neighborhood that, itself, is seeing a growth spurt.
Originally, the garden's raised beds boasted many of the crops you typically see in New England, with lots of extra tomatoes and lettuce. But many of the people who live here are not from New England.
"We have new Americans in the neighborhood who really love garlic onions sweet potatoes," Wright said. "They've taught us about growing sweet potatoes and what parts you can eat which we never knew."
Fellow master gardener Bonnie Barthbaier, who also tills this land said, "What we found out is that they prefer the sweet potatoes, but not the potatoes ... the sweet potato greens which are very tender and very good is just that is something we're used to cooking."
When you teach people how to be self-sufficient by growing nutritious food they like, the garden becomes a gathering place.
"We can see the immediate impact on the neighborhood this is a community garden in a true sense in that it brings people together," Wright said.
But perhaps most unique about this garden is its location right next door to the Oxford Street Homeless Shelter, where some of the people who spend their nights on the floor, spend their days in the dirt, growing and nurturing something for the common good.
Wright recalled a moment when she could see the difference their work is making.
"A couple of years ago, there were a couple of gentlemen who used to be landscapers in a previous life before they fell on hard times," she said. "One day one of the men said to me, 'I've never felt more human. Thank you for letting me help.' That really impacted me and made me want to come back."
The Master Gardener Plant Sale is going on until May 26. You can order online and pick up your native grown plants in person at Village Park in Falmouth.