A Glance Around the Community Garden

I always find it interesting looking around at all the other plots in the community garden.  I don't know if it is the same for all community gardens, but there is such a rich diversity of plants and styles and techniques out there, and people are always happy to stop and chat about what they're doing, what problems they're having, etc.  For me this has been a totally unexpected benefit of growing out there - it really is a community.  A crazy, rich community with people from all corners of the world.

Some of the plots are still untended (though just a few) and some people I think are already starting to feel a little overwhelmed (it's weed season!) but many plots have seen a lot of work already.  There are two plots that were dug into raised rows and covered entirely in black plastic by a 76-year-old man growing more hot peppers than I could ever imagine what to do with.  (Kimchi, apparently.)


Black plastic covered rows of pepper plants

D's garden, with the soil beautifully tilled and a few seedlings planted 

My garden neighbor D and his brother have been hard at work in their 3 plots, though D said he's still waiting for the soil to warm a little bit more before he plants all his seeds.  D comes in the early morning several times each week and produces an amazing amount of food.  His gardening style is very traditional.  He mostly plants summer crops, tills in aged manure and plants in rows.  He cultivates all this soil with a metal rake, maintaining a nice dust mulch by scraping through the top inch or so of soil several times per week, until about August when he's harvested what he wants and decides to let the weeds reclaim the garden.



M's garden plot

M's garden is always well-tended.  He comes in the early evening and grows a more contemporary garden.  He has established wide raised beds, with lots of added compost and mulches.  He grows year-round, doesn't till at all, and frequently plants several different plants in the same bed.  He also seems to know everyone at the garden, and is always willing to answer questions, swap information, or lend out a tool or a hand.  He is sort of the garden ambassador.



A crazy garden

Two plots down is a guy I've met a couple times but whose name I never seem to remember.  He's another veteran of the community garden, and seems to know an awful lot about growing, but his style is a little less tidy.  It always looks that way.  I'm not kidding - always.  He grows a lot of stuff, the mess just moves around to make room for plants as necessary.





And then there's me.  Somehow, my garden always looks sort of vaguely unfinished - a hodge-podge of gardening techniques used in a non-committal manner with varying degrees of success (e.g. the broccoli bed half-covered with jerry-rigged tulle.)  The new gardeners all seem to think I know what I'm doing - maybe because I had such a good lead on the season - but maybe the look of my garden reflects me pretty well.  Uncertain, undecided.  Still feeling my way around this gardening business and figuring out what it all means to me.

A Garden is Personal

N and I recently got new neighbors.  The house next door to ours has been empty for several years while our elderly neighbor's son debated about if and when to sell it.  His mother had lived there for several decades - it was the house he grew up in - and cleaning it out was difficult for him.

Since the new neighbors moved in they've been doing a lot of work, inside and out.  On the outside they've hacked down innumerable bushes that Ms V planted over the years that have lately gotten completely out of control, and planted almost as many decorative trees.  They tore everything out of her big flower bed, which was overrun with nasty vines and grasses, dug up all the dirt, and put down a layer of wood chips.

It's really impressive how much they've done, and I think it will look much better when it's finished than it did in recent years.  But I can't help but think about how much pride and pleasure Ms V probably took in each one of those plants when she put them in.  Did she enjoy them as much as I enjoy the peony that's - surprise! - decided to come back this year even after N knocked it down with the string trimmer last summer?

Or the stargazer lilies I planted the spring before R was born?

But that's the thing: the stargazer lilies are special to me, personally, because they remind me of my honeymoon, and now that they've been growing in my yard, they remind me of the summer we remodeled the kitchen and how we had to leave the house open and the heat was terrible, but the room was full of the scent of the blooming lilies....  And they won't remind future occupants of any of those things.  A garden is personal, and this new young family will bring and make their own plant associations, and that's how it should be.

Ms V had the dogwood tree in her flower bed chopped down a few months before she moved out.  It was big and beautiful, and she had bragged to me once that she brought that little tree home from a friend's house in a paper cup years ago.  I couldn't understand why she had it chopped down when it obviously meant something to her.  But watching the new owner wildly thunk a pickaxe into the ground where it used to stand ("I'm like a kid in here" he admitted sheepishly when he saw he'd been caught), I'm kinda glad it's gone.

Is Gardening Green?

There are some aspects of gardening philosophy that I really wrestle with, and one of them is ecological impact.  There are a lot of good reasons why I believe that people should grow their own food, but I'm not sure that the saving the Earth is one of them.

Growing my own food does allow me to reduce the amount of food transported to me over great distances.  Also, my garden is mostly free of pesticides and totally free of herbicides.  When I do use pesticides I follow the instructions to the letter, and time my applications so as to minimize the threat to beneficials and pollinators.  (Many insecticides are only harmful to these creatures during the time it takes them to dry after being applied, so they should be applied in the early morning on a bright, sunny day.  After that they must be ingested - by an insect actually eating the plant - to kill.) 

However, there are a lot of good reasons to question the environmental benefits of growing your own food:

1. Excess packaging and shipping associated with any product purchased for use in the garden: tools, seeds, fertilizers, soil amendments
2. Environmental damage due to the production of these materials (I'm thinking of things like rock phosphate, chemical fertilizers, peat...)
3. Excess water use above what would be required in large-scale agricultural production
4. Damage to the soil due to improper/unskilled management (here I'm thinking about the fact that most farmers no longer till their land, while most gardeners still do, resulting in loss of topsoil and the disruption of the natural soil food web)
5. Loss of natural environment due to the extra land required for my inefficient (relative to professional agriculture) gardening
6. Extra energy required to store food produced in a seasonal climate for year-round consumption vs. transporting it from more temperate areas

It strikes me that even the most knowledgable and conscientious food-growing projects I've heard of rely on the import of - at minimum - lots of organic material from the surrounding area.  Many of them could not function in the absence of conventional agriculture.  Or they could, but would need to devote considerable land to the sole purpose of producing biomass to add to their food-producing soil.

What do you think?  Is gardening green?  Do the environmental benefits outweigh the drawbacks?

"So What do you Think About Organic Gardening?"

Someone asked me this a couple months ago during a pipe dream conversation.  I replied, "It's really hard."  [As a point of order, my garden is not even really organic, as I routinely use synthetic fertilizers.]

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love gardening.  But to imagine that people used to grow all of their food in this manner - picking bugs by hand from what is to me an unimaginable number of plants, weeding said plants, caring for livestock, etc - is to understand why it took almost all of humanity's waking hours for millenia just to keep themselves (mostly) fed.  Every now and then I think too hard about what it would take to keep all of us fed for a year and it scares me.  Check out Aimee's post Winter Stores (A Thought Exercise) at New to Farm Life if you want to see a real farmer run the scary numbers.  (And then just keep reading her blog as long as you want, because it is damn good.)

As I sit here, typing one-handed at a blatantly, defiantly unproductive activity like blogging, I am amazed by the good fortune I had to be born in a time and place where I am unlikely to ever watch any of my babies die of starvation because I just can't make it rain.