I currently garden in four very urban spaces: The rooftop of my building where I have been growing a wide assortment of edibles in containers for over a decade, a Guerrilla Garden on a very busy urban street corner (also about 10 years in the making), a community garden plot, and a local yardshare (new for 2010).
This isn’t all of it, just some of the stranger items.
Interestingly enough, the year I decide to give up on the garden is the year Operation Garden Terrorism seems to have come to a halt. Or maybe I just didn’t notice the damage because the garden looked so haggard!
Past Interesting Items Found:
Click the image to see full-size.
I’m long overdue to present a mini roof garden tour this year, let alone a garden tour of any kind. As always I’m behind, which inevitably leads to thoughts that things aren’t just right yet. Or the light is wrong. Then of course there is the classic, “But wait until August when the tomatoes are like trees.”
But then August comes and I rarely post a photo, or take photos of the whole thing for that matter. And then winter comes and I am asked for photos or am putting together speaking presentations and I find there are no photos to show. So instead I spike the water bottles with LSD and ask the audience to use their imaginations.
Kidding.
And then spring comes and I proclaim that, This will be the year of hyper documentation! And then June rolls around and it turns out that I missed the pea plants when they were a vibrant green and covered in delicate pink flowers, and the lettuce boxes when they were in their prime. They will never be just like that ever again and there are no photos to prove it. Gardens are in a perpetual state of change and you can’t make it turn back in time. And you can never make it be exactly what you want, exactly when you want it.
So with that preamble I give you the roof garden as it is right now, not just right and not exactly what I want when I want it.
Containers on the west side of the roof. Pictured are 4 tomatoes, potatoes, lemon basil, assorted lettuce greens, ‘Tom Thumb’ peas (they’re on the way out, hence the yellowing), bok choy, broccoli (we just harvested the first head), and mizuna.
The mizuna that ate Manhattan. I had planned to pull this out and replace it with peanuts but it’s so big and happy, I just haven’t had the heart to do it yet. As you can see, I mulch most of my containers with straw. Works like a charm to keep the soil moist for a longer length of time. I also discovered that the starlings (birds that nest in the wall of our building) are less likely to snip pieces of living plants and instead go for the straw during early season nest building.
One of my favourite tomatoes of the varieties I am growing for the first time this year, ‘Mountain Princess Dwarf’ ‘Yellow Pygmy’ [edit: I got it wrong! Oops.] It’s so pretty and delicate. I almost hate using those words with “princess” in the name (am I perpetuating a stereotype?). It already has a few tomatoes and a ton of little flowers. I’m thinking this might be the variety that parents can use to get their princess-crazy children interested in gardening.
This photo (facing east) makes me cringe for all sorts of reasons but I wanted to show you a couple of elements. The first is the tent we put up this year, very different from the gazebo we typically hang to protect ourselves and some plants from the intense heat.
The roof is completely uninhabitable without some sort of shade cover, and a small umbrella does not cut it. We could not find a gazebo this year, so opted for a wedge gazebo from Ikea. It cost $30 CDN. Unfortunately, it was a bit large for the width of our wall so we had to improvise. I didn’t like it at first and miss having somewhere to hang baskets, but its free-form nature is growing on me.
The other element is the colourful striped rug. I got that for $4 from the as-is section of Ikea. There were no tags or info with it but it looks to be made from something like plastic rope. I like the feeling of it underneath my bare feet. I’m not sure how I feel about it aesthetically, but am giving it time.
I already showed you part of the wall. This is the other part. Here you can see a tuberous begonia (needs a bigger pot), my alpine trough, violas in a rusted paint bucket, and lettuce.
This is how I grow my indeterminate tomatoes on the roof. I pot them up in large garbage pails (one tomato per pot only!) with holes drilled in the bottom for drainage. I then surround them with lettuce plants early in the season. As the summer heat picks up I pull out the lettuce and replace them with basil. All of these heads are on their last legs and will be eaten soon. Again you can see the straw mulch in effect.
A nice colour combination: ‘Australian Yellow Leaf’ lettuce and purple violas (unknown variety but they have a thin line of silver around the margins.)
This is my other favourite tomato plant right now, ‘Dwarf Medium Ruffled Pink Oblate.’ Look at those thick, ruffly leaves! Tomatoes are on the way.
There’s lots more in the details but I’d rather reveal those slowly over time.
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One of our weekend projects was turning this vintage doll buggy into a mint planter. The plants inside are, from left: ‘Orange’ mint and ‘Ginger’ mint.
I bought the buggy last fall. It cost 5 bucks at a street sale. At the time, I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, I just knew I had to have it. Davin thought it was a bit of a wreck and did not appreciate taking turns pushing it home so I could finish drinking my coffee.
Since then it has sat outside on the roof. I originally stuck a pot of marjoram in it because I was concerned about damaging the integrity of such a gem by putting holes in the bottom. It held straw mulch a few days ago. A neighbour suggested I transform myself into the somewhat scary local eccentric by pushing the miniature pram around the block filled with straw. Baby needs to get some air!
Over the weekend I finally broke down and made some holes in the bottom using a hammer and a giant nail so we could turn it into a planter. Or rather Davin made some holes, although I want to make it public record that I did not force or even ask him to do it! There was some nasty water sitting in the bottom of the carriage. And let me tell you there is nothing nicer than a refreshing splash of rancid water on the face on a sunny Saturday morning.
The two mint plants that are now planted in the carriage/pot were originally intended for the community garden plot, but I already have a ‘Ginger’ mint over there anyways and the colourful foliage just looked like it was meant to live in that rusty old carriage. It’s not uncommon for me to grow or buy plants with an intended purpose in mind, only to switch gears at the last second. Some of my best ideas have evolved this way. I like this one a lot and was mentally patting myself on the back all weekend for coming up with it.
I can’t wait for the plants to grow and start trailing all over the sides of the buggy like gnarly tentacles!
Total cost of this container planting: under 10 bucks. Pretty good when you consider how much mint we’ll get out of it at the end of the season.
Leave a commentOn Saturday afternoon Mary and Joan (and Davin, of course) came by and helped us clean up hundreds of cigarette butts, several broken bottles, the bamboo fence we built two seasons ago that had been literally and purposefully kicked in inch-by-inch along its entire length, a bag full of miscellaneous garbage, concrete dust left by City workers and three big bags of garden waste.
By Sunday morning the garden had acquired some new garbage and a broken bottle. By Sunday night there was a large, dead, potted palm, 6-8 cigarette butts from the neighbors, and the garbage bag full of waste that we had picked up only the day before had been dumped back onto the garden. Whomever did it took the garbage bag with them.
I’m enraged. I’m heartbroken. Actually, neither of those words are accurate. I’m beyond both. The last few years trying to tend the garden amidst what is happening in this neighborhood has been like fighting a war. I can’t fight this war anymore. It is too painful. And I know now that I can never win.
When Joan and Mary showed up to help yesterday carrying with them their enthusiasm, good cheer, and two delicious salads made by Mary, it was very heartening. A neighbor named Barry also stopped by and gifted me a bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) from his garden. I love bloodroot. It all felt good. It felt like both myself and the garden were cared for by a community. If they had not been there to share in the labor, I would have picked up all of that garbage along with another helping of bitterness and resentment.
The other day, while laying on the proverbial couch bemoaning more troubles with the garden my therapist (who is also a gardener) said, “A garden can feel like your own body. When someone attacks it, it feels like they are throwing up on you.”
It does.
Perhaps that will read as dramatic to many people but it is the truth of my experiences as a gardener. I put myself into it. I’ve tried not to. I’ve tried to detach. It doesn’t work. And even if I could somehow manage to remain emotionless about the act, the fact is that I don’t want to experience gardening in a detached way. I’d call that landscaping.
From the moment I put my shovel into the ground so many years ago, I became responsible for that space. I care about that little patch of land and what happens to it. I don’t think that was ever my original intention, but it is what happened. For me, gardening is an emotional experience and a complicated exchange. When I work in the garden I nurture, I care, I feel, and in return I am nurtured, I nurture myself and I work through my troubles; a relationship develops. I unintentionally set down roots.
Unfortunately, in a neighborhood like mine, this has come with a price. Depending on what is done to the garden it can feel like the perpetrators are literally puking up their utter disregard and trash on me. At other times it feels like they are throwing all of their own self hatred, guilt, shame, and inner turmoil at me. Two summers ago, when someone very purposefully flattened a patch of plants with their feet, I could feel the rage that went into that act. I could feel the anger and pain and hurt. When passersby throw trash and allow their dog to poop without picking it up they are saying, “I don’t care about anything, myself included.” When the people who live directly over top of the garden continue to throw their cigarette butts into the garden, especially after it was so obviously cleaned up by their own neighbor, it is like they are whispering in my ear, “We are so invested in our self-loathing, we can’t see what is in front of our eyes.”
When people dump their diseased and used potting soil onto the garden, it feels like they are assuaging their guilt. When they deposit dead, potted plants into or at the edge of the garden I imagine their confession, “I feel badly that I killed this plant but I can’t accept responsibility for it. I need to pretend it is still alive and that you can save it. Here, you be responsible.”
I can’t be responsible anymore. And that was partly why I asked for help. Cleaning up the garden as a group, as a caring community, lifted some of the burden of what lay at the heart of the acts that went into destroying it from off of my shoulders and heart.
Experiencing these assaults on the garden over and over again makes me angry and filled with rage. But knowing what lies beneath the assaults makes me sad. It hurts. I am not impervious to pain. And I don’t think I can continue to set myself up for it anymore.
Before I go on, I need to be clear that what’s happening with the garden isn’t normal. I’ve been gardening that little patch of land for 10 years, and while there has been garbage thrown, some things destroyed, lots of thieving, and a bit of weirdness, what happened then could never touch what has been going on over the last 2-3 years. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 14 years, and I have watched it change. At first I could attribute an acceleration in violence being perpetrated against the garden as the result of the turmoil being experienced in the neighborhood at large as the effects of increasing and accelerating gentrification took hold. But then the bars went in. This part of the neighborhood is turning into the new club district and the people coming in experience the neighborhood as their personal playground rather than a place where people live. They just don’t give a shit. And many of the street people and disenfranchised who live here are being displaced. And they are angry. Rightfully so.
I think there is a lot that can be said about the fact that when I moved into this neighborhood it was considered dangerous and bad. The “bad part of town.” The other side of the tracks, literally. And now that it is cool and hip and “good” it has become a terrible place to live. That “bad” neighborhood had its problems, but it also had a sense of community and caring that thrived underneath the so-called bad.
Unfortunately, the garden has become a target, something to vent on. Gardens can mean a lot of things depending on where you are coming from and how you look at it. Or don’t. Because unfortunately, many people are so screwed up that anything beautiful can feel like an affront or have so little disregard that they are simply blind to it. As I said before, I can’t disconnect myself emotionally from what I put into the garden. And as a consequence I feel it all. Continuing to try and garden through this feels like I am playing a hand in my own abuse. It’s like I am standing on the street and waiting to be spit on.
Yesterday was the first day of the garden’s year. Hardly 12 hours had passed before new damage was done. Not 24 before a total assault.
After 10 years digging the garden, building the soil, putting in plants, taking out plants when the City decided they wanted to put in a garden, putting plants back in when the City decided they didn’t want to put in a garden, replacing destroyed plants, replacing broken fences, spending my own hard-earned money, wasting hundreds of hours of my own time, picking up shit, filth, garbage, etc.; I am done.
I tried my best. I don’t own this space and always knew that I would have to make my exit eventually. It hurts to walk away from it in this way, having been defeated and feeling like I’ve failed on multiple levels.
Walking outside to that scene tonight was the breaking point. It is finished.
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The snow has melted and it is time to take stock of what has accumulated in the street garden since the fall. In my neighborhood, gentrification is running rampant like a pack of drunken college kids and has brought with it bigger troubles than my little garden has seen in its decade-long existence.
I’ve decided to begin this one where I left off with the last post on this topic in April 2007. And then there was a 13th. I’ll wait for you to refresh your memory and then we’ll reconvene here and go through the newest additions together.
14. Years of accumulated alcohol-laden urine from bar-hopping dudes soaked into the soil: Thousands of liters and counting, since the number of bars and young dudes driving in from Ajax and Whitby hoping to get their “cool on” is sky-rocketing exponentially. Apparently, my garden is the number one outdoor public bathroom around. My question is: Do I get a shiny Public Service ribbon as a prize?
Forget “Gardening for the People.” Perhaps I should change my slogan to, “Beautiful Outdoor Bathrooms for the People.”
15. Now With Even More Butts: Because our new neighbors like to smoke their darts out the window and the garden is like a magical disappearing ashtray. Poof! The butts just go away! None of that annoying having to dump them in the garbage or see them accumulate all wet and nasty in the backwash at the bottom of a beer bottle.
I can make funny, sarcastic remarks about this, but in all honesty, my blood boils whenever I think about just how many butts are out there. I will inevitably waste an hour of my life because these people are too steeped in denial to take responsibility for their own mess. It sometimes surprises me just how dense adults can be. An apt metaphor for our overall disregard for this planet, I suppose.
Needless to say, I am waiting for a calm moment to knock on their door and discuss it with them. Going over there raging probably isn’t going to do much good. The only problem being that my rage isn’t subsiding. Perhaps I should send them a bill for both the cleanup and the therapy required to work through my anger around their butts?
Living in the world with other people isn’t always easy.
16. Cigarettes + White Dog Poo: I know both of these have already been covered, but I can only imagine that while they are both nasty separately, together they fuse into a toxic brew with which nothing can compete.
17. Spinach?: First there’s the brand name, “Topless.” Topless? Sounds like someone needs to put a paper bag over that spinach to protect the eyes of the innocent. Then there was that whole poop in the spinach/ecoli fiasco in 2006 that put everyone off the vitamin-rich vegetable for at least a few months. Can a bundle of spinach of unknown origin left in my garden be considered toxic waste? And last but not least, huh? I can only imagine that this is more of that bewildering “Back to the Source” logic at work. I am building evidence to support this theory. Expect my thesis in 2011.
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Taking all of this into account, I don’t think I can face the cleanup alone this year. My heart rate goes up to dangerous levels by just looking at the disaster that has been enacted upon the garden. I am going to set aside my general inability to ask for help… and ask for help. If you have an hour to spare this Saturday afternoon, and have not been frightened off by the content of these posts, I would gratefully appreciate your help in cleaning this mess up. Beverages will be provided; however, you will need to bring your own Hasmat suit.
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