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Who needs vegetable gardens?
The elderly, and families with children, according to a 2003 report by the US Conference of Mayors.
The number of families with children requesting emergency food assistance increased in 88 percent of the survey cities...59 percent of those requesting emergency food assistance were either children or their parents.
The number of elderly persons requesting emergency food assistance increased in 73 percent of survey cities.
Payday by Dan Barker
This article originally appeared in the Sun magazine.
It’s summer, and I’m taking two fund management women around to see where the money is being spent, and to see if the money is being turned into productive life-sustaining gardens. We come to a shabby sort of house with cracked urns on the steps that have been planted with tomatoes, and go through a plywood and 2” x 4” gate on a half of a roller skate, into a backyard that has been completely denuded of any plant life by a 200 pound malamute that is less protective of the three kids than of his space. The mother orders the wolf/dog into its shed, then leads us to the small fenced patch beside the house where we built the garden.
And going through the gate we see a vigorous and resplendent swarm of superbly managed growth. Tomato vines climb the trellis and are bowed with fruit. Onions spike straight up, planted between effulgences of red sail lettuce, squash vines spill up the walls and along the fence tops, bright horns of yellow flowers leading back to expanding patty pans and acorns. Here and there are blue ageratums and bright orange nasturtiums. Small blocks of new lettuce and spinach are sprouting from the dark wet soil. It’s like the inside of a young mother’s womb. Every inch of soil space is well occupied, growing, producing, grandly healthy, and the kids are grazing from the vines of peas and beans that have bounded from the frame and taken over the back wall. Ferny carrot tops and asparagus grow interspersed between strawberries and are still dewy from watering, the sun’s dazzling wavebeam captured, transformed with its solid self into fruiting fire glistening on the leaves.
“This is a wonderful garden,” the taller of the two women says. The other women, a shy scholar, looks perplexed. She thought all the gardens were going to Black people. “How long have you been gardening?” she asks. And the young mother interrupts herself, saying, “This is my second, get off the fence, boys, garden. My first one with raised-beds. I mean now.” “But Mom,” they whine in unison, “we’re hungry.” “Well, save some for dinner. Other people live here too.” And the kids offer a glad rebuff, saying, “Aw, Mom, we’re never going to run out of food.” She lets them continue; now she doesn’t have to prepare lunch.
The tall woman asks a few more questions, but the gestalt of the garden and the family has fully penetrated. The women are both kind, and do not ask where the husband is; they’ve seen no tools or dismantled cars or motorcycles to indicate his presence. Just three bikes in various stages of mechanical experimentation. And the dog. The inspectors want to know if the raised-beds are a better method of gardening, and the young mother says, “I had no idea that these kind of gardens could be so productive and easy to manage. Everything is right in front of you. Just the shape suggests what to plant, and when and where. I don’t think I’m out here more than an hour or two a week. I just send one of the boys out to turn on the water in the evening. The blocks are so full, no weeds sprout up. Not only is there enough for us, there’s enough for all the neighbors.”
“Are you going to do some canning?” the tall woman asks. And I interject that I’ll send on the address and date of the canning co-op, where she can use their clean specialized equipment at no charge. And the young mother seizes the opportunity. She later becomes one of the Project planters, and goes to the gardens of people too old or frail to plant for themselves.
So we crowd into the 1/2 ton Ford that has hauled five hundred gardens, with sheet metal showing through the floorboards, for the drive down Liberty Boulevard, a four-lane industrial byway neither of the inspectors had ever traveled, to go on to the next garden out in S.E.
Which is also a neighborhood they only suspected existed. Down 63rd, a narrow street, no sidewalks, past seedy ramshackle composed of sheds and single-wide old trailers, two-bedroom ranch styles peeling paint, arborvitae hedges gone rusty from red spider mite infestation, past one bedroom shacks that held couples mutually tied into all consuming hobbies, like birds, or turtles, or yappy lap dogs, or jigsaw figurines, past homes holding perpetual garage sales, front yards cluttered with hot knickknacks.
“Take a look,” I say to the inspectors, with a little edge in my voice to wake them from their sad staring reverie, “this is where we work.” And they are not so much afraid of the environs as shocked and ashamed. The Black scholar is trying to twist a Southern tenant farm into righteous justification. But I can see it isn’t working. She’s adopting the can’t wait to leave body tension, and will grudgingly admit to her psychiatrist husband that a White man is actually doing worthwhile work . Who will say, well, no wonder he’s always on the defensive. And she’ll counter, finding a new human realization, that he’s pro-active. He’s fighting through, he’s doing real work.
We pull into a gravel driveway. The house is freshly painted, the flower beds weeded and planted with impatiens. A variegated box elder shades the mown lawn. The old folks who live there come through the screen door beaming glad you are here smiles. He looks a little lost, and I remember him getting in the way when we were building the garden, like he’d been in front of the television so long he couldn’t remember that physical work required space and held danger. She’s everyone’s grandmother in her always busy in the kitchen apron. Her eyes are shining, like she’s got something to show us.
And she does. We walk around the back of the house, through the narrow gate made from aluminum siding, and the last Eden-Womb garden we visited is dwarfed by a veritable jungle of tomatoes and corn, winter squash and cucumbers, sprawling and vining ten feet tall, beans planted Aztec style climbing the cornstalks, completely filling the backyard. She’s planted not only the boxes, but the paths between the boxes, and he has laid one foot strips of wood in the paths for passage. The foliage is so thick, the fruits so abundant that walking through the garden makes one wish for a machete. Without asking, she starts breaking off ears of perfect corn, filling a basket in a few moments, and handing it to one of the inspectors. “Peck-o-corn for ya, honey,” she says, “An’ you eat that. You’re way too thin. City life, huh.” Then she grabs me by the arm and plants a big wet kiss on my cheek, saying, “Look at this! We’re feeding everybody. The kids are afraid to come over anymore. We make them take goodies home for the grandkids. You knew this was going to happen like this, didn’t you?” And my heart goes giddy, but I must remain reserved, the folks with the money are watching.
The old man chimes in, saying, “Hell, sorry Mom, even the folks at the center are shying away from us. We show up with a trunk full,” he cackles. He then says, “Wait a minute,” grabs a paper bag and starts filling it with tomatoes, “you gotta take these home with you. They are the best we ever grew. Sweet, juicy as a young, sorry Mom.” and hands it to the scholar inspector. A little moment of White giving to Black animosity perks a twinge of embarrassment, but the silk blouse says she’s doing better than they ever did, and she is gracious, and accepts the gift.
The garden is in neither perfect order or wild abandon; it is thick and bent with harvesting, but it feels like if it wasn’t for roots it’d wing off into the sky.
Mrs. leads us inside, and while we try to find comfortable positions in the narrow kitchen she takes a tray of homemade chutneys from the refrigerator, and ceremoniously adds a dozen demitasse spoons to the tray, then passes it to us. She’s been collecting the spoons for years, and they have enameled pictures of state flowers on them. The chutneys are each piquant and delicious, and we’re all making yum noises and exchanging glances of surprise. It’s not mere politeness. Mrs. is delighted and beaming, and just a twinkle smug. The food industry didn’t have her convinced that science made them better cooks.
So we came away from there with a peck of corn, ten pounds of four different kinds of tomatoes, many perfect summer squash, several pint jars of chutney and a quart Mason jar of superb salsa, that I got to take home. That, and a relished memory.
On leaving Mrs. says her daughter wants to get on the list to get a garden, and yes they’ll be needing manure in the fall. They’re afraid of the neighbors, but will tell them how to get a garden if they ask.
But we’re not done, not by a long shot. Two good gardens out of a hundred aren’t sufficient conviction that they ought to recommend spending $45,000 over three years. They behave demurely, unimpressed, like they get shown astonishing and Herculean tasks every day, that they’re their toast and jam. And maybe it’s true.
So it’s on over to old Mrs. Smith, alone in her suburban house, out in her garden, watering in her tattered house dress and jeweled slippers. We approach the garden from the alleyway, and the two Black women smile broadly at each other. The scholar asks if she has been enjoying her garden, and there is no hesitation before the response. Sunlight glints off a silver tooth, and her eyes are shining. “Enjoying it? This is my garden! Mine. I’m out here every day. Just look! These cucumber vines are fifteen feel long. Burpless, you know. I’ve been eating out of this garden since the first of April. I’ve got collards all winter. Pumpkins for the grandkids, they already have their names carved on them. They come over and water them. With the diabetes, I got to have fresh food. Look at my onions, they’re as big as baseballs.”
“The secret to growing giant pumpkins is sugar water. Teaspoon per gallon, twice a week,” I say. Mrs. Smith winks at me. She doesn’t recognize me. We’ve never met. She sounded like an old woman on the phone, she was gone to the doctor the day I came to build. So, I cheated on the form. So what? One less humiliation. One less embarrassment. She’s a great gardener.
“You know what this is, girl?” Mrs. Smith asks the scholar. “This is poke salad. From home,” and she looked at me, asking me the same question, and I answer, “Sure do. I brought it to you. Came from Florence over on Delaware.” And now it’s her turn to be surprised. And so is the scholar. No, she’s never seen it. She smiles shyly, showing teeth as perfect as can be produced from orthodontial torture.
We’re chuckling at her enthusiasm as we leave, walking down the alleyway to the house next-door, and finding a young mother tending her garden. She’s not nearly as happy. She’s got a black eye, and she’s trembling in shame. And I get a twist of heartache, a bilious urge to murder, and a stab of guilt that I might have precipitated the argument by bringing her the garden and shaming him.
“I ain’t putting up with it anymore,” she claims, no hellos, no introductions, just a sympathetic presence is enough to start her talking.
“I would’a gone sooner, but the garden was feeding us,” she further claims, throwing out a hook of shared responsibility that I wasn’t about to take.
“Take it with you,” I say. “It is yours. It belongs to you. Find a friend with a truck, get a couple of shovels, and spirit it away when Bozo is out getting a six-pack.”
“I don’t have any friends. You know what it’s like living with that kind of an asshole.”
“Get loose, and you’ll be able to make some,” I offer, a way, not a rescue. “And take this number. It’s the women’s shelter I built a garden for this spring. Keep it hidden. They’ll keep you hidden.”
To keep the pain to a minimum, we leave. Just so I’ll know, I drop back by later in the summer, and the garden is gone. Taken, destroyed, I don’t know.
So we proceed. The women are showing visible signs of fear, stepping a little closer to me, pushing me along toward the truck, eyes furtive and saddened. “How about one more,” I offer, “one on a major street?” They exchange a look of relief, and I hear the tall one say, “I’m sure glad he’s six-foot three.” There is the nape sensation of a rifle being aimed at us, just a bristle, we didn’t see the barrel poking through the back bedroom drape.
Out of the ramshackle and potholes and onto the blacktop arterial, a broad residential two-lane that stretches thirty blocks without a stoplight or a store. The Southside boys use it to test their Firebirds and Camaros. Along the avenue I point out houses where I’ve built gardens. A widow, an old couple, a family man with Crone’s disease, a middle-aged woman with mental afflictions who’s planted yellow wooden daisies among her salad crops. Several of the gardens are in the front yards, all of them growing quite nicely, and I can see that I don’t have to convince the inspectors, they’re won over. I almost suggest that we skip this next one, but the gardener is expecting us and I want to nullify the poison of our last encounter.
We pull up in front of the corner house, and there’s the garden, two double-high soil-frames in the front yard spilling over with produce. A child distorted with spina bifida is watering from her decal decorated wheelchair. The keeper of the house has dressed her in stone-washed Levis and a colorful blouse, and combed her pretty blond hair back into a country girl ponytail. The soles of her running shoes are white and unmarked. This is her job, and the garden attests that she takes it seriously.
She is being supervised from the ramped porch by two other children in wheelchairs. In all, there are five children under fifteen, each with congenital defects, living there under the care of a woman who’s heart must be the size of New York.
The older woman who lives next-door, the one who called to get the garden for them, comes over. She’s crying. She approaches, then gives me a big sobbing hug and looks me straight in the eyes, saying, “Do you have any idea what a blessing this has been for those kids?” She wiped her tears on my shoulder, then called out, “Marjorie, come on out. The garden man is here.” And the caretaker appears in the screen door, wiping her hands on a tea towel. She’s frumpy and tired, and doesn’t have time to chat. “All of those kids have been abandoned,” the neighbor tells us. “She gets a hundred fifty dollars a month from the state for each kid. That’s it. She works all the time. I help when I can, but I’m getting too old to be much good.”
The three of us agree that we’ve seen enough for today, make some polite sounds, and are off, back to downtown. I’m not worried about funding from that foundation. I’ll be well greeted when I show up. Their endorsement would percolate throughout the caring community.
For me, it is time for a real Silver Bullet, Tanqueray and a blush of vermouth. Maybe two. With big olives. If the scent of fresh ginger is ecstasy, plant ginger.
[If you'd like to read more works from Sun magazine --essays, interviews, short stories--by many writers, look for the anthology Stubborn light: A collection of writings from the second decade of the Sun (The best of the Sun). The essay "Giving Away Gardens" was included in the anthology.]
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articles from Smithsonian | Sun Magazine: "Giving Away Gardens" | Our mission and how to help
© 2005 The Home Gardening Project Foundation. Last updated October 2005.
