A brief inventory

A fresh sunburn sits proudly on my shoulders, neck and chest. Tom and I take long after-dinner walks through the neighborhood, where kids play in the street until their mothers call them in only when the sun gives up its very last ounce of light. Gardens are watered by 6am to give plants the best chance of taking up water. The sometimes faint and sometimes overwhelming scent of burning charcoal wafts through SE Portland. Summer has arrived.

In the garden much has happened over the past month, and I have written very little about it. I’m finding it difficult to make myself sit down and write. I’m in the garden instead. I’ll try my best to jot down notes when I can as I know I’ll thank myself next year when I need to be reminded of what the 2009 season was like. Here is a quick recap of what’s been going on:

1. Tomatoes are producing beautiful green fruit. We now have about 11 plants, mostly because they kept being offered to me and I couldn’t resist.

2. We are now up to 10 pepper plants for the same reason. We’ve got several varieties including many italian types.

3. The red orach is getting very tall. I’m letting several plants go to seed so that I can see the plant’s entire life cycle (it is said to be very beautiful when it flowers) and to save seed.

4. Peas are growing like mad. I planted them too close to the tomatoes, which they now shade. A farmer friend suggested I release them from their trellises and place them on the ground—they are vines after all. I’ve done so, and the tomatoes appear much happier. But I’ve sacrificed my pathways for the peas, so now I must jump over them to access other plants. This has been a great learning experience in the importance of timing and placement.

5. Beets were slow to get going, but we are now enjoying perfectly formed deep red globes. Thanks to the floating row cover provided by my dad, we are also enjoying tender pest-free beet tops.

6. The garlic (both hard and soft neck) is now curing on the back porch under the shade of the ginkgo, with the frequent breezes of the last few days helping to dry them. The garlic got rust this year, which I’ve never experienced. The entire community garden seems to have contracted it. It has affected the leaves but not the bulbs, although I’m wondering if this may mean that they won’t store well. We may have to eat all 22 bulbs sooner rather than later.

7. I’m finding it  more and more difficult to  garden in the middle of a city park in the middle of summer. Half-naked dodgeball games with blasting music, back-to-back kickball sessions in the diamond adjacent to my plot, and bicycles locked up to the garden gate making it impossible to use the entrance, are all making me a little mad (both angry and crazy). Tom reminds me that this is a public park and that these kids are just having fun, and he is right. And I just want to be a gardener, having some peace. I understand that my expectations are askew for my particular situation. I’m idealistic. But until something else comes along, this is what I have to work with. In this park, I’m learning what is important to my gardening experience. And, I’m learning to go early in the day–dodgeball rarely starts before 2pm.

Gardens on the road

In 1871, the keepers of the wooden Yaquina Bay Lighthouse received their provisions by ship once a month. They cooked on a wood fired stove, enjoyed the luxury of running water in the kitchen (a rarity at the time), and grew produce in a small plot of land behind the lighthouse. Today, children of one of the local Newport elementary schools garden here. Giant globe artichokes, perennial herbs, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, celery, beets, greens and radishes abound nearly 140 years after the lighthouse was built.

 

Two blocks west of the Lincoln County jail, in the parking lot strip of a row of painfully ordinary county buildings, lies this garden. What at first looked like an average weed patch revealed itself to be a patch of food, complete with radishes, carrots, lettuce and corn.

Back home, my garden was well tended by Tom and my friend, Sarah. White currants, garlic, beets, blueberries, arugula, cilantro, strawberries, and peas welcomed me home.

Time out

I’m headed to the coast for a little over a week. I’m excited to go, but already missing my time in the garden. Thankfully, I’ve got a cooler full of garden greens and herbs to take along. Here are some shots of the garden this week. 

The long haul

I arrived at Joan’s shaded four square home just after 9:30am on Saturday. Joan had been ill and hadn’t been to the community garden for some time, but she had herbs she wanted to donate to the Colonel Summers Community Garden Herb Project, and I was there to pick them up. She gave me a tour of her backyard where I received useful advice about which herbs to plant directly into the earth and where, and which ones were so greedy that they’d need to spend their lives confined to pots.  After gathering the sage, oregano and parsley starts for the garden, I began to say thank you and good bye, when she grabbed her sun hat and a basket of tools. Only then did I notice the streaks of white sunscreen lining the edges of her silvery eyebrows. She wasn’t going to miss this. Joan was coming back to the garden. I later learned that the herb garden was her idea—one she’d been wanting to bring to fruition for years. 

Joan was the first to break ground, digging deeply and ruthlessly at the thickly rooted comfrey which had all but taken over the garden. She was also quick to point out the myriad invasive grasses with contorted roots that spread far and wide to the root zone of a beautiful pink peony and through the wire of the garden’s chain link fence. This all had to go. Not a speck of weed root could be left or our work would never be done—we’d be forever haunted by these garden bullies. And so, we, the somewhat lazy modern gardeners, persevered. We fought powerful and collective urges to hastily pull what we could of the weed tops, to leave much of the root unscathed, to cover up the evidence of our shortcuts with a bit of dirt so Joan wouldn’t notice. 

And for as much as we tried, our efforts still fell short of Joan’s. We really did give it our best, but there was no getting around the fact that we simply lacked a lifetime of experience. Joan has something many of us don’t. She grew up on the land, in rural Hillsboro, Oregon at a time when the town proper contained a mere 3,000 people. The landscape was rural and untainted by the countless strip malls and chain stores that now blemish its surface.  Joan was one of five children, and she wouldn’t have eaten were it not for the garden. 

Perhaps because of this, Joan gardens from a different time and perspective. From a time when a three-way soil blend couldn’t be bought by the yard and delivered. From a time when, for the average gardener, the path to good soil was longer than it is today. Soil was built over the span of years, not in an afternoon. It was built through steady work, cover crops, crop rotation and the addition of inputs from the family homestead, often in the form of manure from livestock, decomposing plant matter and kitchen scraps. Joan gardens with frugality and resourcefulness as her guides. But as frugal as she is with her external inputs, she is equally generous with her hard work, time, attention, and genuine love for growing food. 

Slow gardening won’t produce extraordinarily high yields right off the bat. It likely won’t make you the envy of your neighbors. It might not win you the giant tomato contest at the state fair. But it probably will help you develop an honest-to-goodness relationship with the land and an understanding of life—of a plant’s, the soil’s, an insect’s and perhaps best of all, your own. Kind of appealing, isn’t it?