The Naked Gardener

If I haven’t posted in the past week it’s not because I wasn’t out in the garden — in fact, it’s been a crazy week, preparing for a big day tomorrow all along the Emerald Necklace, the historic parks system that our Fenway Victory Gardens are a part of.

After a spell of dismal weather it feels like spring is really here in earnest, and just in the nick of time — the tulips are glorious, and the hyacinth and daffodils are still going strong — the magnolias have a weekend of glory before losing their blossoms…

The water’s on, the compost — we have three enormous organic compost heaps for the vegetable waste from our nearly 500 gardens — that’s been cooking for the last six months is being processed by a guy in a bobcat today and will be ready for gardeners to add to their beds tomorrow.  I had a look today and it’s good and rich!

As part of their Arbor Day of Service, Maltby & Co. Arborists have chosen to do a good deal of much-needed tree work in our neck of the woods.  There will be some major pruning, removal of invasive Mulberries, a fire-blighted crab apple, and a diseased linden, and the planting of several new trees along the perimeter of the park…

We will also be having our open gardens tomorrow, so if you’re in the neighborhood drop by and follow the signs.

Tons more to do, but cap your Saturday off at a screening of the “The Olmsted Legacy: America’s Urban Parks”, which premiered at the MFA last fall to a sold-out audience.  Check it out at Blount Auditorium at Wentworth (550 Parker Street) at 4:30.

I’ll be back with some gardening tips on Monday, after I’ve recovered from the weekend.

I was reading Ashlee Fairey’s article in the latest Courant about EarthFest on the Esplanade.

“It is detrimental” to the park, said Sylvia Salas, executive director of the Esplanade Association.

The article goes on:

The weight of thousands of people on the grass compacts the soil, making it difficult for water to reach tree roots, Salas said.  Tree damage leads to runoff, which in turn can pollute the waterways.

Salas says the 125,000-strong crowd usually leaves about seven tons of trash and six tons of recycling, “a low amount of trash”, according to a municipal development  representative — and truthfully, it does work out to about a quarter lb. per person, which isn’t a lot until you put it all together.  Last year it took the DCR about one 8-hour shift to clean up the mess.

 The irony.

But it’s telling.  And it actually illustrates in a microcosm the impact of population on our environment.  Rapid population growth threatens natural resources, levels biodiversity, and strangles quality of life. 

Cornell University professor Dr. David Pimentel famously put the optimum human population at two billion.  As of  9:43 a.m. EST, we’re at 6,913,379,238.  Here’s the problem in a nutshell:

About 15 million hectares (1 hectare is about 2.5 acres) of new land are required each year to support the earth’s steadily expanding population. Unfortunately, more than 10 million hectares of arable land are severely degraded and must be abandoned each year due to water and wind erosion, salinization, and water logging. Since topsoil formation proceeds at a painstakingly slow rate of about 2.5 cm every 500 years, arable soil is being degraded at a rate that far exceeds our environment’s replacement capacity. The 15 million hectares of new land required each year to sustain growing population are thus being taken largely from the world’s forests; however, the consequent deforestation is producing a shortage of the raw materials used to make paper products essential to a “quality” standard of living. In short, efforts to compensate for the deficiency of land resources by redistributing limited resources can and will continue to be felt in the decreasing availability of food and other products on which our present standard of living depends.

Surging food prices may be having a greater impact on regime change in the Middle East than any democratic aspirations of the masses there.  According to the World Bank, food prices are 36% higher than this time last year, pushing an additional 44 million people into poverty. 

There’s reason to believe that folks celebrating EarthFest on the Esplanade are themselves isolated — or at least feel that they are isolated from the food crisis when in fact the ripples will impact all of us, and certainly the consumer choices we make have a ripple effect in the rest of the world as well.

We like to celebrate, and there’s a season for it, but I think a better approach to Earth Day might be something along the lines of Vancouver’s “30 Zero Zero” challenge – 30 Days, Zero Waste, Zero Impact.  Something to at least acknowledge that all the strain we put on the planet might require some sacrifice on our part, too. 

No irony intended.

People with disabilities are often excluded from community gardening because most community gardens lack accessible facilities.  Increasingly, however, community gardens in Boston are looking for ways to provide access to the whole community.  The challenges are pretty formidable, though, as the experience of the Richard D. Parker Memorial Victory Gardens — more commonly known as the Fenway Victory Gardens — demonstrates.

The Accessible Gardens in the Fenway Victory Gardens were first formalized in 1999.  Before then, a dedicated troop of gardeners with disabilities, led by Domingo and Ann Fernandes, started their own informal garden for people with disabilities (naming it “the Special Needs Garden”).  In 1999 the board of the Fenway Garden Society partnered with the Northeastern University student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers (NUASCE), who designed an ADA-compliant plot off the paved main path.

The plot measured roughly 26′ by 124′ and in its original form (above) contained enough wheelchair-accessible raised beds to accommodate four to six gardeners, and three long raised beds for those with limited mobility.

Over the ensuing decade several issues contributed to chronic underutilization of the  plot, which was never really embraced by the community for which it was built.  Part of the problem, in my opinion (and as a member of the Fenway Garden Society since ’05 whose garden abuts this one, I do have an opinion), was lack of active outreach and programming for the space.  FGS had an “if we build it they will come” attitude, but the facility was not publicized and the community of people with disabilities didn’t seem to be brought in as stakeholders in the project.

(One issue here is simply limited resources.  FGS is a wholly volunteer-run organization, and the Accessible Garden was built before we received 501(c)3 non-profit status.  While we remain an entirely volunteer-run organization, we do have more resources at our disposal now, not the least of which is the cheap and easy social networking that has revolutionized the way non-profits approach outreach.)

Other features of the Accessible Garden while picturesque proved to be prohibitive.  From an extremely bumpy path made of concrete pavers that required constant weeding between them, to the barriers you see between the path and grassy areas that made it difficult and dangerous for folks with other mobility issues — walkers, canes — to make it over to the other raised beds.  These well-intentioned touches were actually discouraging use.

Furthermore, the wheelchair-accessible beds were not as sturdy as they needed to be — I was gardening over the fence one afternoon a couple years ago when a particularly enthusiastic gardener rammed his motorized wheelchair into a raised bed, knocking it over.  For less enthusiastic gardeners the edges of the beds were not rounded, making it uncomfortable to rest arms on them.

These are all issues that would not necessarily be apparent to everyone, but would be immediately apparent to many people with disabilities.  The plot was technically ADA-compliant — the paths were wide enough, the wheelchair accessible beds had the minimum clearance — but the plot was in reality not very user-friendly.

Which highlights the importance — really, the fundamental necessity — of having gardeners with disabilities as central stakeholders in any accessible garden project.  It’s not merely a matter of consulting folks cursorily in order to get a “stamp of approval” — the gardeners who will garden there should be intimately in on every phase of development, design, and implementation.  To proceed otherwise is to miss an opportunity at inclusion that will ultimately determine the success or failure of the space.

As the original beds deteriorated, FGS reached out again to NUASCE.  The students came through with an ambitious vision:

More than doubling the gardening space available in much sturdier wheelchair-accessible beds with a number of ingenious design-improvements, from rounded edges to “hollow legs” for growing vegetables with deeper roots.

Because of time constraints and prohibitive costs (the students from NUASCE raised all the funds for the project themselves and donated what must have been hundreds of hours of time to the design and construction of the garden — an amazing, amazing bunch of kids) some elements will have to be modified in the very near future, particularly the path.  Parks & Rec has pledged support, and we’re hopeful that funding from various sources will follow.

In my next post I’ll talk a little bit about the challenges we face going forward.

Sarah Hutt from the Berkeley Community Gardens was kind enough to show me around these already busy intensive gardens at the crossroads of the South End and China Town yesterday. 

Urban gardeners are always looking for inspiration, especially when it comes to creative and elegant solutions to the issue of space, and a stroll through the Berkeley Gardens is guaranteed to give you a lot of great ideas.

You’ll see all the elements of intensive gardening impressively implemented here: 

Raised beds.  The advantages of raised beds for vegetable gardening are many and various, from the fact that the soil heats up faster to better irrigation and drainage.  They reduce soil compaction and allow you to divide your work into manageable segments so that you don’t get overwhelmed.

Closely spaced plants.  If you’re not into the zen of weeding, intensive raised bed gardening is definitely for you.  You won’t see a lot of room for weeds to grow in a typical well-kept Berkeley Garden, but you do want to be careful to avoid crowding.  You can find a good intensive spacing guide here.

Companion Planting and succession gardening.  Intensive gardening does take planning, and you’ll want to bone up on which plants benefit one another and when they mature. 

Did you know that marigolds are a natural pesticide and great companions for tomatoes and squash?  Beans (a great source of nitrogen) are good with potatoes, cukes and pumpkins, which like nitrogenized soil.

Relay gardening — multiple plantings of one crop — or succession gardening, where your cool weather crops like broccoli, lettuce and peas give way to warm season crops like tomatoes, peppers and beans, will give you something for your dinner plate throughout the whole growing season.

But remember, it takes planning, and you’re going to want to start your seeds early.  Having six-inch transplants at the ready will give you a jump on each successive harvest.

Vertical gardening.  While this photo of hanging chayote (from Sarah) is from later in the season, it illustrates one of the coolest elements of intensive gardening. 

Many gardeners at the Berkeley Gardens create “outdoor rooms”, whole mini-ecosystems, where gourds grow up mesh walls and form a ceiling — or canopy — that extends the growing season of cool-weather crops like lettuce by filtering the sunlight that reaches the raised beds. 

Even if this is a little intense for you (or your community garden — like mine — won’t allow you to build an enclosed garden like this) there are lots of ways to incorporate elements of vertical gardening into your own garden design.

Whatever your interest in intensive gardening, a stroll through the Berkeley Gardens will give you a lot of food for thought.

Forget what T.S. Eliot famously said about April.  He was obviously not a gardener.  Karel Čapek was, and his observation — “April, that is the right and blessed month for the gardener” — is closer to the truth.

Let Lovers go to Jericho with their praises of May; in May trees and flowers only flower, but in April they bud; this sprouting and shooting, these germs, shoots, and sprouts, are the greatest wonder of Nature, and I shall not tell you one word more about them; sit on your heels and poke with your finger in the puffy soil, holding your breath, for your finger is touching a full and fragile bud.  It cannot be described, just as kisses and some few other things cannot be described in words.

Still, for the uninitiated this indescribable activity surely looks, if admittedly from afar, like, um, poking around in the dirt.

In fact, April is all about poking around in the dirt, something gardeners can seemingly never get enough of.   April is the time to start turning the soil.  You can smell it in the air.

You can even start sowing seeds out of doors: peas, early-seed potatoes, radishes, spinach and leaf lettuce can go in now, with chard, turnips, carrots and beets a little later.  By the end of April you’ll be transplanting all those cooler-weather crops you started indoors to your garden.

At the Fenway Victory Gardens we start getting a lot of requests for allotments this time of year.  The weather is warming up and passersby can see the place is humming.  Many wait-listed gardeners are impatient to get going, but what they often don’t realize (or at least don’t seem to) is that most of those ahead of them in the queue have been planning their plots for months already.  It’s the applications we get in the dead of winter that most interest us.

But I understand.  April is not the season for patient waiting.

If my father hadn’t died in April I doubt I’d be gardening today.

I had worked in the orchards of New Hampshire for years in my youth, and had even moved up to foreman my last couple of harvests at Moosehill Orchards in Londonderry.  And I enjoyed every aspect of my experience of agriculture, from picking apples in late summer and fall to pruning in the dead of winter.

But gardening is different.  It’s not merely about the math, and even when it is about the math, the element of self-expression is essential to gardening. When we talk about cultivation, we’re not just talking about the soil.

It’s like that line from Serpico: “If you love a man’s garden, you gotta love the man!”  (And that goes for the ladies, too.) Truth is, you can tell a lot about a gardener from his garden.

Pop had a secret garden.  Well, growing up we had a wooded lot, and pop didn’t garden at all.  But when the kids all moved out, my folks bought a place in a new subdivision in one of those vast Indiana cornfields developers were converting wholesale into cookie-cutter suburbs during the housing bubble of the ’90s.

On one of my first visits to their new home, we stood in the driveway looking out over a vast, treeless lawn.  And my father declared: “I’ll never have to rake another leaf in my life.”

He didn’t mind shrubs so much, and the next time I visited he’d planted a rather arbitrary hedge behind which was his secret garden, visible only from a big bay window that served as the breakfast nook.  I’m not sure why it was such a secret.  My father was a real man’s man — ex-Marine, motorcycle — maybe he thought gardening was for girls.  I don’t know.

He had designed the little plot on graph paper, meticulous equations and cryptic notations in the margins. It was his mini-Versailles, small but grand, a round bed precisely in the middle, flanked by four beds that looked a little like fleurs-de-lis.  Mostly he’d plant whatever grabbed him on his sometimes twice-daily trips to Home Depot:  pansies and petunias, marigolds and morning glories.

For years he tended his little garden and admired it from his nook as he took his morning coffee.

In October 2003 he was diagnosed with 4th-stage inoperable lung cancer.  I moved back home that December to help my mother care for him.  The garden at that point was like a haunted space.  No one had had time to clean up in the fall, and mornings in the breakfast nook — well, you looked out on a pretty bleak picture, at least until the snow came.

It was a hard winter.  My father went from bad to worse.  Pneumonia further weakened him.  As spring approached we opted for home hospice, and did all we could to make his last weeks as peaceful as possible.

As the snow melted, the garden strangely beckoned.  I say strangely, because it was like something out of an old tale.  Not knowing how I ended up out there exactly, one day I started digging. As if possessed.

Within a couple of weeks, I had the plot cleared, soil and mulch in the beds, and seedlings on the window sills. Soon the nook had taken on the look of a greenhouse, the morning light bringing the space to life.

I installed a simple fountain in the big round bed, the one feature this mini-Versailles had been missing, with plumbing running round the side of the house. My father was (I like to think) quietly in awe of this engineering feat.  Every morning I would wheel him out to the nook and he would command me to “turn on the fountain!”

With pleasure.

That was one of the greatest joys of my day.   Both of us looking out over his secret garden — our secret garden — listening to the trickle of the fountain and talking nonsense.

Gardening was a revelation to me.  It was a gift my father gave me that allowed me to give back to him.

Since then I’ve bumbled along, following my whims where gardening’s concerned, listening to friends, trying various methods and plants with mixed success, and enjoying every minute in my garden — a plot in the storied Fenway Victory Gardens which I’ve tended for seven years now.

In 2010 I was elected President of the Executive Board of the Fenway Garden Society, a nonprofit with over 300 active members responsible for the stewardship of over seven acres of parkland along the Emerald Necklace in the heart of Boston.   We boast close to 500 garden plots, an ADA-compliant Accessible Garden, and a Teaching Garden open to all who want to learn about urban gardening.

This blog is an extension of my enthusiasm for all kinds of gardening, and my desire to share that enthusiasm with others.  I hope you’ll join me here and in the Fenway, and that we can grow together!