Nested systems

A lot of changes in the past two years, and some constants.  I've come back around to the same points on different planes of the spiral once or thrice.  The peach seedling gifted to me about five years ago is bearing its second batch of fruit in my front yard.  The loquat seed gifted to me a year ago is now a foot high seedling, same size as the peach was when it came to me.  My home garden has grown from a few beds to about 15, and the sunflowers and zinnias and tatsoi come up at will throughout.  For the first time in the last seven years, my home garden is my only garden, and I am finding the need to answer to this question: who am I outside of a community garden?  I have left the comfortable nest of engaging, salaried jobs and have had some time to retreat and withdraw, reconsider and reframe.  And now it's time to relaunch.

I used to move at least once a year, and now that I've been settled in the same place, and intend to stay here for the foreseeable future, my work has begun to shift.  A change in perspective from running programs to beginning to look at the systems in which they (we) exist.  The things that I notice about the role of nature in urban places remain the same.  The capacity for a school or community garden to provide the setting to experience sparks of wonder at nature's intricacies, sparks that generate curiosity, love, awe, and a sense of magic.  The energy these sparks unleash that drives people to tend a garden and eat from it, to plant a flower, to turn compost, to tilt smiling toward the rain.

But now I'm looking at learning a new role, moving beyond being a shepherd of immediate experience to a facilitator for translating the experience into meaning and eventually action toward a sustainable future.  There, I said it. Sustainable.  Which begs the question, what do we have that is worth sustaining?  Don't think too hard on that, because the more important question is this: What is the future we want to create?  Like it or not, from each thought to each rote action, everything we do has a consequence.  So what would it look like to be intentional toward specific consequences?  And what if we could have some basic agreement on those consequences?  More clean air and water.  More topsoil.  More diversity, everywhere.  More gardens, more Wild.  More love.  More harmony and joy.  Those are some of the qualities I would like to sustain through my actions and choices.  Those are the building blocks for some concrete future.

So from this little nest to....there.  Time to test the wings.

springtime

I was walking from Pastor Toni's birthday celebration back to the garden with Jeremy today. He stopped to tie his shoe and I waited, and still waited after he told me I could go on ahead. He thanked me for my patience and I wondered out loud if there were scissors at the garden for cutting lettuce for the salad we wanted to make for the party. Jeremy knew that there were, and I said that I like that he always knows where things are and he returned that he likes that I am patient. I've been hearing that a lot lately, about patience--from children and adults. And that is rarely how I feel. There is so much to do, but there is so little good that comes from rushing, particularly in gardening.

Today I rushed to wash off a glass gallon jar of fresh milk and I broke it in my porcelain sink. That was all of Myrtle and Flair's milk from this evening. Yesterday I left a roll of chicken wire in the new coop, and today when I stopped home for lunch I heard a chicken ruckus. A biddie was stuck head and wing in the wire and was getting a nearly fatal lesson in the pecking order from the big girls. The little one is recovering in her box on the book shelf, looking like a vulture with her defeathered, scabby neck, and now the remaining two have a properly fenced area of their own, safe from those from whom they cannot protect themselves yet.

Life requires attention, and attention requires patience.

It has been a busy spring, as usual. We've been working on building a pizza oven in the garden out of found materials. Another exercise in patience. Hauling concrete rubble from neighboring yards; sand and clay from a construction site down the street; more sand from the banks of Sugar Creek where it crosses under Arkwright. And then sifting the clay and sand, and making mortar out of it, mixing to the perfect consistency with bare feet. And placing the stones and concrete just so around the rubble-filled tires to build the foundation. And leveling the brick for the oven floor. In the book it says you can build one in a couple of days. We're not going by the book anymore.

In the midst of oven building the redbuds bloomed like pink popcorn. I mentioned to fellow builders that the flowers are edible, and tasty. Some concurred and some did not, and one became a redbud aficionado, who tasted flowers from every redbud we passed in our forays for materials. He noticed that each tree has a different flavor, and decided that the one in the garden tastes best. That tree was stripped clean of all flowers within reach, which he nibbled directly from the pulled-down branches. We ordered pizza for lunch as the oven was still in progress, and he topdressed his slice with a layer of redbud flowers.

Just beyond the redbud tree, the rye grass and clover that got seeded out in January is a few inches high now, struggling along in the heavy clay, and now where ever I dig there are worms. Sometimes people tell me they think the garden is abandoned because they never see people working there, and I feel like I haven't done my job well enough. But it has taken 4 months for the grass to grow a few inches. Reclaiming this site will require even more patience than I have yet doled out. And I am hopeful.

Last weekend at the neighborhood potluck in the garden, a woman came who grew up down the block. Her granddaddy farmed the land that is now the garden and the middle school, and she remembers being on his farm. The land will remember what it once used to do, and as we patiently call it back to its past purpose, it will pull us in the right direction toward the future we are beginning to allow ourselves to imagine.

soil prep

P1180042
Originally uploaded by Southeastern Horticultural Society

I've been looking at the huge patch of woodchips since we reorganized the garden this fall, moving all the blueberries and perennials to create some more usable space, dreading the thought of tilling the soil. Or, rather, clay with an icing of woodchips.

So last Monday, to celebrate MLK day, about 30 volunteers showed up at the garden to build new compost bins and do some tidying up. And instead of renting a tiller, we just dug up the clay, turning the woodchips into the red earth in hopes of attracting lots of big fat worms to break down the chips and build up the soil. No noisy, stinky, dangerous machine, and everyone could help. A two year old boy wielding a shovel half his size happily dug a little section while older boys swung their shovels seriously.

We turned the whole area, about 30'x30', in a little more than an hour, then seeded it with rye and red clover. The boys moved on to hammering in nails to finish off the compost bins afterwards.

At the end of the day, after working pretty hard for a few hours, the oldest boy who had been helping, a middle schooler, asked if I'd be there on Saturdays so he could come back and help some more. This on the heels of an Atlantic Monthly editorial eschoriating school gardens for putting kids to stoop-backed work in the hot sun, when perhaps their parents or recent ancestors had worked hard to avoid this very fate (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/school-yard-garden). Hmm. The school garden as a tool of oppression. Something rings false about that, but the accusation deserves some thought.

Agricultural labor is historically and currently poorly paid and brutal. Farm workers held as slaves in Florida last summer, locked in sheds after long days of work. Itinerant workers travelling across the country, following harvests, living in unsanitary conditions and getting exposed to agricultural chemicals. So do I support this oppression by extending the opportunity to dig up a patch of soil, preparing the ground for cover crops and eventually vegetables, to some young boys on a January morning? Should I rather be inside teaching them something on a computer?

There is a huge disconnect here. First of all, the oppressive nature of agricultural labor is a symptom of the larger problems of agribusiness and immigration policies, and really, free market capitalism. But it does not mean that agricultural labor is innately demeaning work. And most importantly, most kids who have the opportunity to work in a garden fight to maintain that opportunity.

What is the purpose of this garden? My goals with it are not to prepare children for a future in itinerant agricultural labor. No, we are working on imagining a new way of feeding ourselves. This garden is an opportunity to discover the natural world, a place to learn how to work together toward common goals, to share the resulting harvests, to test ideas, to create art, to make good dirt.

And good dirt starts with feeding the soil--digging in the woodchips and planting cover crops is the first step toward the rich tilth that will bear fruit. It's a slow process, as will be the creation of truly sustainable and fair agricutural systems. It's where we start. The worms will show us the way.

cold snap

We are cold in Atlanta, and plants have stopped growing. The lettuce unhappily defrosts every morning, and succumbs again each night to ice. If you touch it when it is frozen it will die. If you let the sun thaw the leaves, the cells become elastic again and live one more day.

The fava beans look like they won't be as tolerant as the lettuce. Only last week they were blooming. It was taking a chance to plant them so late--I think they went in late September--but the flowers, unexpectedly small for such a robust looking plant, were a hopeful sight in January. We'll replant in a month or so for an early summer crop, or perhaps just as a cover crop to feed the soil.

The board over the window of the slowly-imploding house next door has been removed. Someone may be sleeping inside on these freezing nights, and it can't be much warmer in than out.

In this garden rest time, the seed catalogues are pouring in, full of bright colors and tantalizing new varieties. Also, a mural wall has sprouted in the garden. We went shopping for paints just before the holidays, and picked out colors to rival any seed catalogue. With a blank canvas, a palette of fancy spray paint, and an artist to lead the project, we will create a vision of the garden in full bloom before the first season's seed gets tucked into the earth.

This and other projects will easily fill the time before planting begins. Farmers in colder climates get a little longer break than in the South, but we'll take what we can get and hopefully use it wisely.

kudzu

I am finally surfacing from the first half a year working at the new garden: officially, 'the Southeastern Horticultural Society's Community Learning Garden at Edgewood,' but known in the neighborhood simply as 'the garden,' or more specifically, 'the garden across from the red store.'

I have a lot of catching up to do. A semester of after school programs, installation of a water catchment system involving repurposed utility poles and highway signs, starting a garden from scratch, and neighbor relations.

I have little to no budget for programs, so we had to get a little extra creative for fall craft projects this year. One thing we have in abundance in Edgewood is kudzu. Much maligned for turning roadside forests into emerald oceans of vines with the hulking monsters of overcome trees, kudzu is a treasured resource in its home territory across the sea. Like poison ivy, it thrives in disturbed areas. Originally imported to prevent roadside erosion as highways started to creep across the South, kudzu reached its tendrils much farther than its keepers ever intended. Growing up to a foot a day, and free from the confines of pests and conditions that keep it in check in its native Japan, kudzu seems to be taking over the South.

Edgewood boasts some acres of unbuilt, unkempt lots where kudzu has made itself comfortable, covering trees, tires, mattresses and the other usual urban detritus. A field recently cleaned of kudzu unveiled a giant James Brown bobble head doll, old paint buckets and a squeegee. The long ropy vines reach up into the trees and run over the ground, thick and flexible and, we discovered, perfect for wreaths.

Kudzu is a prized basket-making vine, easy to work with, plentiful, and durable. IMAGE afterschool program helped harvest long vines, pulling them down from the trees and yanking them up from the earth. Dragging our harvest behind us like strands of seaweed we shaped the vines into wreaths and decorated them with holly leaves from Edgewood Courts Apartments and dollar store ribbons.

Not only useful for holiday decorations, kudzu is used medicinally to help overcome alcoholism, and its spring shoots, flowers and roots are all edible. Kudzu is one of a host of plants from other countries that most people lable "invasive," or "invaders." Or sometime "aggressive," "exotic," or, more generously, "introduced." Common in Edgewood yards, along with kudzu, are privet and English ivy.

A lot of energy and resources goes into controlling these species as part of 'restoration ecology.' The interesting thing about this is that there is no natural point to which to restore a natural system--systems evolve forward in time; they don't go back to a previous point. So by pulling out all the 'invasive' species, a restoration project may temporarily (until humans stop maintaining the restoration process) increase biodiversity, it slows down the system's own process of working toward equilibrium with a new set of species.

To borrow a phrase from Bobby Wilson, I said all that to say this: using conventional wisdom, Edgewood is a resource-poor neighborhood. That conventional set of lenses looks out at Edgewood and sees overgrown lots, trash, youth engaging in crime, and a shifting population trying to create a safe community. However, shifting perspectives, Edgewood offers up more useful treasures than sun-bleached plastic effigies of James Brown.

In addition to craft materials, the invasive species' provide healthy fodder to the neighborhood's small flock of goats, converting kudzu and privet into milk and meat. The garden across from the red store, as it gathers purpose, provides a community gathering spot as well as a place to learn, grow food, and spark the imagination of a neighborhood trying to become a community.

With the scent of pie wafting tantalizingly from the Edward pie factory, Edgewood even smells like hope and home on baking days. I'm not saying all we need is rose-tinted glasses and apple pie to make all the challenges disappear, I'm just thinking that a shift in perspective will help in working out creative solutions using the resources at hand. If life gives you kudzu, then there's nothing to do but make wreaths.

transition

I've missed a few months, it seems--so much has been happening at the garden and there's been no time. The corn was planted, grew tall, tassled out, grew ears, and the ears were prematurely eaten by squirrels and rats, as they are every year. I don't think corn is a good crop for the garden, as it takes up lots of space and nutrients, but rarely yields a harvest to us humans. The bees and the rodents may beg to differ though--the bees are still diligently collecting the pollen.

Bee camp came and went, two weeks of a garden drifting with smoke and sticky children draped in veils. The hives survived the daily poking and prodding, and the last group set up an observation hive with glass walls for viewing the inner activity. The frames of honey put up in this spring's good flow are almost gone now--we may have to start feeding that hive soon, or add it to our queenless colony.

The other camps have been running smoothly, with the help of a diverse team of interns, who come to us from as far as Bhutan and as close as a couple blocks away. This is my fourth, and final, summer at the garden. I will be moving to a new garden in my own neighborhood, doing very similar things. Except, no chickens, no beehives, no pond, no stream. Just the bones of a garden, planted 3 weeks ago, on the corner of a busy sidestreet across from the corner store.

I've been working at the new garden in Edgewood in the evenings after full days at Oakhurst. Mainly I've been spreading woodchips there, with a dependable team of 3 young boys who magically appear every time I'm about to give up on the never-ending chip pile. This corner was a patch of rubble left over from a tear down a couple years ago, but already there is a black swallowtail caterpillar on the one parsley plant, and little brown and orange butterflies and a variety of bees (even some honeybees! From whose hives?) visiting the echinacae, butterfly bush, and black-eyed susans so recently planted. What else will come with this garden? It is in a neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification, what some of my older neighbors who've lived here for generations ambivalently call "the change." Being in this new place reminds me that gardens can be so much more than they seem.

plants

I realize I've spent a lot of time writing about the animals here and have missed the less obvious goings-on of the plants. The peas bloomed, and then were laden with pods, and then were picked nearly clean and are now starting to yellow. With the Boys and Girls Club group we sauteed the peas with soy sauce, honey from the hives here, and some red pepper flakes. The week before, we picked the last of the pokeweed before it starts to flower and is no longer edible. We did the recommended boiling in two waters, and in the meantime made cornbread (with cornmeal from Riverview Farms and eggs from the chickens here). There was a small fight over who got to eat the last of the poke greens.

The cilantro and Paris Island romaine have been harvested and sold to Nectar. Just planted beans and okra between lettuces and the red mustard in preparation for the transition to summer crops. And we planted about 500 flowers--marigolds, zinnias, sunflowers, cosmos, quinoa, celosia, gomphrena, bachelor's button, calendula, coleus, strawflower and pincushion flower. Most of these had sat in their pots too long and are stunted, rootbound, and bolting. Hopefully they'll overcome this adverse beginning, take root and grace us with a very colorful summer.

The spring weeds are beginning to give way to warm season plants--the chickweed is yellowing and the ragweed knee high. And the bees are finally getting some good flying weather. Ok, a little bit about the bees, because a lot has happened. We've added 3 nucs, a swarm someone caught and gave to us, and a split with a new queen. A total of 7 hives now, one queenless, or at least, queen-not-right. One of the nucs came to us queenless, and they were raising a few new queens. When I checked this week, at least one queen had emerged but there were no eggs and the colony roared loudly, a sign that all is not quite well with the queen--either there's no queen, or a queen who's not laying yet. I'll check again next week and hopefully see eggs.

The elephant garlic, grown from seed passed on by Daniel, who got it from Omar, who himself passed this winter, is nearly ready to harvest. Its long scapes are starting to kink, with pointed buds on long graceful necks seeming to peer this way and that in the garden.

I have given up planting by the biodynamic calendar--I plant whenever I can at this point in the season, trying to get everything in the ground in time, and waiting impatiently for the garlic and potatoes to give up their space so I can plant more summer crops.

The push pull of the garden is at its highest tension right now. Wait to harvest cool season crops, but not too long or the bugs will get them, and not to soon or they won't be ready. Wait for space to open up to plant more summer veggies. Where to plant all the flowers? And the gourds and okra that need so much room? The garden is sometimes like an overcrowded closet, with plants thrown in wherever they fit, or even if they don't. And remember to leave room for the people...