Deep Thoughts

August 22, 2007

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The Continuing Epic Saga of the Street Garden

Yesterday afternoon, while working on the garden, a woman stopped to chat and mentioned that she had seen my sad and pathetic sign (my words, not hers) and knew who had destroyed the day lilies. It was the dudes who change the advertising on the large billboard that hangs on the wall over the garden! She said that she watched in horror as they intentionally trampled all over the plants — something they did not have to do since there was plenty of room and their equipment wasn’t in the garden and made it possible for them to avoid the garden completely. Never mind the fact that the garden has been sharing space with that billboard for years with minor consequences beyond the annoying lights, the pigeon poop that falls from the nests housed in the billboard structure, and the stray pieces of advertising that falls into the plants. That and the fact that we have to look at ugly advertising splashed onto the side of our building everyday.

As a city-dweller I have become very good at seeing without seeing. So good in fact that I can not provide even a hint as to the content of the current ad and the only ad I can recall in all the years the billboard has been up was for a film with Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino. Something with Al Pacino as the devil.

Anyway, I stood there speechless, listening to the details unfold and thinking that there is some kind of irony in this somewhere given that I had been working on finally trying to fix that patch when she happened by, and feeling sore that I have had to suffer both a financial and personal time loss while my landlord reaps the benefits of that damned billboard AND my hard work. Gah! At the very least I now know to whom I can call and send my complaints.

Still no idea who went after the thistles but I have since replaced that patch with a native switch grass, Panicum virgatum. As previously mentioned, I am intensely nostalgic and possibly a little nuts in the ways that I anthropomorphize plants. This is only made worse by the fact that each plant comes with a story and a history. Like the daylilies that were gifted to me by a friend. Or the yarrow that was given to me by a stranger who happened to be driving by with a clump of yarrow in the backseat of her car. In many cases I can recall where and when I received or purchased the plant. These feelings of attachment and compassion for the life of each plant is so strong at times that it is very difficult for me to remove and discard plants, even when I know it is beneficial to the garden. I’ve also got a stubborn streak that thinks I can shove one more plant in somewhere or bring that diseased plant back past the point of no return. My style is very Do As I Say, Not As I Do and I often struggle with the very actions I know to be right and advise other people to carry out. The only positive I can glean from the Operation Garden Terrorism experience is that it has prematurely forced me to carry out my long term plan to replace some of the more invasive gift plants with natives. But just because I can find a positive doesn’t mean I’ll be thanking the ad hanging dudes or the thistle stomping stranger anytime soon.

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August 7, 2007

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Food That Hardly Travels at All

A friend pointed me to this opinion piece in the New York Times that looks at the Eat Local concept as a way to mark environmental impact in food production. The article describes a New Zealand study that challenges the assumption that distance traveled automatically means higher fossil fuel consumption. The study doesn’t undermine the point that local eating advocates make but instead expands the way we are currently looking at energy use to include more factors that arise anywhere in the food production cycle including, “water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.”

I’ve brought up this article here because although few of us as home gardeners are producing on a massive scale I see urban agriculture and growing food in our own backyards, on rooftops, community gardens, and waste spaces as a way to offset some of our own individual carbon input by eating about as local as it gets — literally stepping out our front or back doors to collect tonight’s dinner. And while that is awesome in itself I have noticed or at least pondered the impact my own small scale food production “systems” may have on the environment. While most of the Ã¢â‚¬Å“factor inputs and externalitiesÃ¢â‚¬Â mentioned in the article do not apply to my style of food growing, there are other factors to consider. For example:

How much tap water do I use in my gardens?
What kind of packaging is used in products such as organic fertilizers, soil amenders, and container soiless mix? How is this packaging disposed?
Where do the ingredients in my container soils and amenders come from? For example, are any natural resources being plundered to provide the peat in my mix?
How far do these products need to travel in order to get to my garden?
What about the materials used to produce the containers I grow in? How far do they have to travel?
What about other materials used in the garden? i.e. Stakes, plastic ground covers, tools, etc?
What about the plants themselves? Are they high-impact energy suckers or are they suitable for this climate and the conditions that exist here?

Having looked at each of these factors I would say that their impact varies depending on the garden or type of garden. For example my community garden plot is in-ground and does not require things like purchased soil, and containers. I employ water-saving methods such as amending my soil, and applying mulch. It’s a fact that container gardens require more water than in-ground gardens and since I can not hook up a rainbarrel system to my apartment, the amount of water used directly from the tap is a whole lot higher than at my community garden plot regardless of how much I mulch the containers, employ water-wise tricks, use greywater, or run outside with buckets when it rains.

I bought packaged soil amenders for the community garden this year and then transported them and myself in a cab from a local garden centre to the alleyway next to my plot. I don’t know where the amenders came from originally although I am hoping that since it was predominantly mushroom compost that it came from somewhere local — yeah it probably didn’t. So in the future I could look into where the amenders are from, buy amenders that are delivered to the curb without packaging, or rely soley on compost from the garden. Thankfully Davin and I have got more composters going at the community garden this year than ever before so that last one is very doable. I walk the bulk of my purchased soil amenders and container soils from the store to my gardens in a granny cart so no fossil fuel inputs there.

As far as containers and container soil goes I feel some relief in that I have been using the same containers and the same soil (with some supplementation of new soil, compost, and other amenders every spring) for several years and will continue to use them for years to come. Many of my containers are recycled items like dresser drawers found on the curb, broken watering cans and busted buckets or items purchased from thrift stores and yard sales.

While I don’t have a special calculating method set up to get a really accurate picture of how my gardens are doing against this sort of equation, through estimation I can guess that the food I grow myself is still generating a much smaller footprint than anything purchased at the grocery store. I’m not absolutely certain about how it holds up against much of the local produce I purchase weekly at the Farmers Market but I would guess that since I am doing a pretty good job of keeping most energy inputs low and adding in the fact that I walk or bike to both gardens and harvest everything by hand my total input has got to be lower still.

What about you? Can you think of any inputs I might be missing in this equation?

Related

Food That Travels Well – by James E. McWilliams
Cheap Containers
Rain Barrels

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July 19, 2007

36 Comments

Please Don’t Destroy My Garden No More

I really need to make a sign like this for my street garden. Except mine would include an assortment of choice words and threats… all the things I want to say to the various offenders but can’t because I never catch them in the act. Threats such as, “If I ever catch you urinating in my garden you better have jets on your feet.” My neighbor once relayed the story of coming home to find a business man had stepped out of a limo and was urinating on our front steps. Now we’re not in the middle of nowhere here. There is a coffee shop right around the corner just a few steps away. Instead of shouting threats or calling the guy out he just walked up, stood alongside him and pulled down his zipper. “Watching you makes me feel like peeing here too.” he said to the startled and confused public urinator. I’m guessing that as a female this tactic would not be effective for me.

I often stop to photograph signs like the one above wherever I find them. And I find them more often than you’d think. It would be nice to believe that everyone appreciates the hard work gardeners put into making something beautiful that everyone can share in but the reality is that some people are messed up and those people sometimes feel resentment towards other living things and acts of beauty. Maybe it hurts them too much? Maybe they don’t feel like they can share in it but rather that it is just another thing they can’t have in their lives? Maybe they’re just angry as hell and need to take it out on something? Maybe they just need to pee RIGHT NOW and they don’t care where and they don’t care how? I don’t know or even understand all of the motives but I do know that just about any city gardener has a story and we’ve all learned an unexpected thing or two about human psychology via our gardens. Although I never would have thought of it, I really dig the signs that threaten karmic smiting. However when it comes down to it I find that I can’t wait or even believe that the “universe” will take care of business, I want to be the one to deliver the blow.

When bad things happen to my garden I sometimes feel angry enough to cut some heads off. Metaphorically of course. But other times I just feel sad. Defeated. When my garden was most recently viciously assaulted my response wasn’t to get angry or violent. Instead, uncharacteristically, I crumbled. I decided to tack up a letter addressed to the perpetrator but all I could muster up was a sad and pathetic, “Why?” This time it just hit me in a way that it hasn’t in the past. This person didn’t just clumsily fall into the irises or trample the lilies on their way to a semi-private pee spot against the back wall. This person maliciously and purposefully took out every globe thistle in the garden. The thistles were big. They were tall and just about to bloom. This person very meticulously tramped every single stem in such a way that the stems were crushed right to the ground like crop circles in a corn field. I’m going to take a wild guess and say that this was not the cruel work of a tiny spaceship or a troop of little greys but the calculated act of a real human. I couldn’t believe it. Of all the things that have happened in and around that garden this particular act just floored me, leaving me feeling sad and powerless in a way that I did not like. So much so that it has taken me 4 weeks to coherently write here about this event. I mean I could get angry and throw stuff but who do I direct the anger towards when they are a faceless phantom? And what made it worse was how the purposefulness of it felt personal, like it wasn’t just the plants that were destroyed but that I had also been kicked in the gut and left to rot. And that no one did anything about it in that way that people will watch an assault on the street and then shamefully turn away from the victim rather than reach out or help.

And it gets worse. I know the attack happened during the day when there is always at least one or several people from the law clinic standing around shooting the shit and smoking. I know because I am never without an audience as I bend over to work on the garden. And they never say a peep and turn away when I look in their direction, never engaging and then when I am not around throwing their butts into the garden. To top it off, when I went outside that day and discovered the destruction I stood there for several minutes in shock. And then the emotions started to come. And as I turned around I caught a woman standing inside the doors of the law office gawking at me! Thanks lady!

About a week or so after the incident, I had finally got up the nerve to go out there and begin cleaning up and moving on. The thing is, what happened sucked but I’ve been through a lot with that garden, worse than this. And I’ve been through a lot in my life, much, much worse than this. And after a certain point I can’t not get back on the horse and keep going. Thankfully my stubbornness knows no limit. As I was getting ready to leave a man stopped and called out to me from across the street saying that he loved the garden and was glad to see that I was able to get back on my feet and keep going after what had happened. I was feeling too overwhelmed at the time to say what I felt but I want to tell that lovely man how much I appreciated his words and support. That seemingly small and simple act of kindness from a stranger really turned things around for me because he had acknowledged what had happened, saw how it had hurt, and turned towards me instead of looking away.

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July 16, 2007

5 Comments

Domino Interview

“I don’t promote myself as an authority. I’m a person who really, really loves to garden. I know a thing or two but there is a ton I don’t know and will probably never know. I make mistakes. I experiment like crazy. I don’t have all of the answers, I don’t believe in that “right” one way to do things, I don’t have buckets of cash, a sprawling estate or a backyard even. There are a lot of people like me who want to grow something and that group of people have been mostly ignored by the gardening industry.“

My interview with The Germinatrix (aka Ivette Soler) is up today on the Domino Magazine blog. This was a really fun and brainy interview — one of my favourites to date. Thanks Ivette!

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July 9, 2007

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Fingering the Pea Vines

The Scene: The sun is about to disappear entirely and my rooftop is now mostly illuminated by the painfully bright and orange security light next door. I am still outside moving pots around and pinching back basil flowers. My neighbor steps outside.

Me: I have been gardening for 7 or 8 hours straight. It started with a trip for some container soil and then over to the community garden to swap out a tomato for a tomatillo plant leading to hours of this, that, and the next. I can’t stop. I am unstoppable. Nothing’s gonna stop me now. Please make me stop.

Neighbor: Pete Flower Sunshine (not his real name but one of those local weather news garden experts with a cheesy nickname that I can’t recall at this time) says it’s gonna be a scorcher this weekend and that you should not do any gardening. “Do NOT garden!”, he says. “Stay inside and relax!”, he says. “Whatever you do, do not garden!”

Me: Well, I should have had enough by now. I don’t want to be gardening in 40 degree temperatures. Tomorrow I can be found laying around with a wet towel on my head.

End scene.

The following morning I decide to watch an episode of Recreating Eden, a fantastic half-hour documentary show about gardeners and gardening that you should watch if you haven’t already. I am barely into the program before I find myself overcome with the urge to get outside and “finger some peas” [cough]. I MUST garden. No matter what I must get outside and garden. And so, just barely holding on until the end of the show, I rush downstairs to the street garden armed with worm castings, sea kelp, pruners, and assorted tools with the intention of doing just a little ‘light’ cleanup. Two hours later Davin and I are both extra sore, sweaty and covered in dirt having spent the entire time in full sun digging up a patch of daylilies that were recently crushed by yet another jerk looking for somewhere to urinate. In all fairness it was probably about 5-10 degrees cooler than the reported killer heatwave. But really, I have GOT to start planning my gardening activities and stop taking on large chores spontaneously. The garden looks just fine but I’m sure transplanting in those conditions was not easy on the plants. Do as I say, not as I do.

All-in-all I probably gardened for a total of 12-15 hours (I’m probably being generous here) over the course of 3 days. I could not stop. I had a lot to work out in my mind and a lot to procrastinate. Gardening is great for both. I didn’t come out with any solutions but I do feel satisfied with the massive list of activities that were accomplished and much less panicked about the things that were worrying me.

*In a recent Toronto Star article, writer Sonia Day noted that I was “fingering a pea vine” a phrase that sounds just a little bit dirty and one that I plan to use as a euphemism for gardening from now on.

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