Community Gardening: Saturday

Saturday started out rough for me. We buried a longtime friend at the age of 47 in the morning, so all I wanted to do was stay in bed. Instead, I ran ten miles and spent an hour in the garden with Sachee and Emily, who wanted to garden but also wanted moral support. Moral support is what I do best (and you thought it was eat random plants) so there I was, crusted over with dried sweat, hungry, low on blood sugar and patience, heartsore, and cranky as hell.

The plan was to finish raising the soil in bed five, and if we got around to it, plant some of these babies, newly arrived by mail this morning:

That's right, the rest of our seeds have arrived! We can plant Monday or Tuesday, whichever's better for us. Tuesday would be better for the seeds but frankly Monday is better for me.

Speaking of cool evenings, the kids seem to have survived the chilly evenings, and the basil is recovering a little bit--looks like everybody's going to make it for now. Come say hi to our plants. They'll love you for it. Really.

Emily and Sachee arrived and I put them to work doing this:

Bed five needed more compost added to it, and being the...ahem, creaky elder of the group (who had also just run ten creaky miles) I was not about to go lifting a lot of buckets of dirt.

Shortly afterward, the garden got a visit from Breena Holland, which was fantastic. She was a little concerned that we didn't turn the cereal rye under into the beds--the point of that is to fix nitrogen levels in the soil--but I explained that when Will and I were there we didn't have the right tools, and we'd been hoping to add it when said tools arrived (I'm hoping to have them by Tuesday). Soooo, since we're planning on planting this week, we have a couple of options:

Option 1: Providing we have at least one shovel--preferably two or three, or a shovel and a hoe--by Tuesday, we can hold off planting for a few weeks in bed five and put the rye back in. This would involve spreading the rye on the existing compost and turning it under so the soil is back on top. We'd then wait a week or two until the grass has had a chance to start to break down, and plant then (probably around the time finals are over? but that's a guess).

Option 2: Plant as scheduled Tuesday without the extra work, but also without the extra nutrients. We have added quite a bit of compost to the bed, so it might be ok. And presumably the rye will be added to existing compost and enrich whatever soil it ends up in. This is the quicker and easier method, but not as healthy. I do feel like we're rushing sometimes, to get things into the ground. In part because of the school calendar, which I understand, and in part because we're just anxious for results--which I also understand, but know in my heart we just can't rush no matter how much we want to. Lessons in patience: grr.

Anyway, I got caught up talking to Breena about this, about the rain barrel she was trying to install, about Martha Nussbaum's articles on the meta-capabilities approach (what? we're nerds. We talk about nerdy things.) and when I turned around Sachee informed me that "We have helpers!" I was kind of worried because we didn't have a whole lot for them to do. And also, frankly, my heart was not about to open again so soon after getting the crap beat out of it that morning. But there they were, four neighbourhood kids, tearing through the gate to help Sachee with a leaf-bag full of compost.

Clearly I didn't have a choice in the matter. (Do we ever?) These kids wanted to know everything: what our names were, what we were doing, where we were from, how come someone as old as me still had homework, did tomato plants always look like that, and why couldn't we grow apples and watermelons instead of carrots? They also expressed a deep distrust that carrots could possibly ever be cool, and no way could they be purple. I told them to hang around all summer and see, that they really did make purple carrots.

We crouched around the bed and went through the top couple of layers of soil looking for big rocks and random bits of plastic sheeting--of which there were quite a few, alarmingly enough. Breena's right, the compost situation is less than ideal. But still, free compost is free compost, and we had four willing helpers not afraid to get their hands dirty. Jeremiah especially was fond of holding things up to us and asking, "What's this?" Usually he was right when I asked him what he thought it was, "It looks like a stick." Yup, it's a stick, and a stick that small is totally ok to put back in the dirt. Anything that's part of a plant or a tree or a leaf is ok right now. It'll break down into the dirt. But that rock? Totally not cool. Throw that over the fence as far as you can--just try not to hit the honors house kids partying in the backyard.

All four kids were heartbroken when it was time to leave. Essence, especially, went around giving us all extended hugs: "Wait.......wait.....wait.....ok." I talked to their mom--somebody's mom, I think Essence and Jermiah's mom--on my way out, and made sure to tell her what a great group of kids they were. After a last round of hugs, they wanted to know what came next, and when we would be back.

This right here is why community gardening is so important, why like I said to Will last weekend I feel it's really important to have a presence here in downtown south side, not just being up at Goodman campus deep in Lehigh Land. What happened in the garden yesterday afternoon is the whole point of community gardening--more important than free vegetables or organic practices or sticking it to the oil companies in the vacuum of our academic, upper-middle-class lives. Opening our hearts, whether we want to resist or not, again and again, coming together with our own loves and our own blind spots and our own flowering hearts, wanting nothing more than to get to the root of things.