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.