Living Abundance: A 75-year-old backyard gardener donates her harvest to local food pantry

Nina Buxton, 5 years old

Third-generation Amesbury resident Nina Buxton grows and donates hundreds of pounds of produce annually from her backyard garden on Lake Gardner. From her 25 by 25-foot parcel, she harvests vegetables, herbs and berries to deliver weekly to Our Neighbors’ Table (ourneighborstable.org), an organization that hosts free food markets in Amesbury and Salisbury. Her passion for gardening started at age five, when her uncle Robert gave her some radish seeds to grow in defiance of her mother who worried a garden that could be seen from the road would be a sign of poverty. Those radishes flourished in, as she puts it, a “small patch in a crappy part of the back yard where nobody could see them.” She goes on to say, “Those were the seeds that planted the seed.” 

Seventy years later, Nina tends her garden throughout the growing season, and every week she picks whatever is ripe, washes it, packages it in reusable bags and brings it to the markets where guests can get the fresh produce for free. Nina’s focus is regenerative gardening, a sustainable approach to growing plants that nourishes the soil and the environment. She doesn’t use pesticides, herbicides or fungicides (even the organic kind), because she doesn’t believe something needs to be killed for other organisms to live. As a Reiki master, she uses her energy as a way of “feeding” her plants. 

The growing season starts in her winter greenhouse where she nurtures plants from seeds and warms them with the heat of lightbulbs from construction-grade lamps. The process requires close attention to nightly temperatures and careful calibration to keep her seeds alive. After the last frost, Nina spends eight to ten hours a day planting and nurturing her seedlings. Her husband, Billy, handles the watering. As the plants mature, Nina delivers her bounty directly to Our Neighbor’s Table markets where 2,842 households can access her fresh produce including tomatoes, squash, brussels sprouts, raspberries, strawberries and blackberries. Her lettuce plants yield throughout the season, so a fresh salad is always within reach for people shopping at the markets.

This holiday season, Nina’s Brussels sprouts and squash will be shared at her own table as well as those of her neighbors. In her words, Nina “finds joy in the beauty of this Earth” and is eager to share that joy, especially with people experiencing food insecurity. Her advice to backyard gardeners is, “We always tend to grow too much, so why not take the abundance to our local food banks where it gets to those who truly need it?”

This story appeared as an Online Exclusive in December, 2024.