only taste-free English cucumbers, peeled to remove all nutrients, and whatever Trojan-horse veggies I can sneak into his diet—tomatoes in pizza sauce, for exam- ple. I was beginning to worry that he would become his elementary school’s sole recorded case of scurvy. I was always told that children who grow their own
vegetables are much more likely to eat them. While I’d been more than willing to give gardening a try, I didn’t know how that would work. Our city backyard is the size of a postage stamp, and too shady to support more than a few wan-looking hostas. I worried what toxic metals might lurk in the soil next to our house, built in 1929 and no doubt once encrusted with lead paint. And my thumb can be described only as red—on the color
wheel, the direct opposite of green. I once famously failed to coax to life radishes, that classic gardening- for-dummies vegetable, planting them in full shade and somehow neglecting to water them all season. So, two falls ago, I was intrigued to hear that a coop-
erative garden was starting a few blocks from our house. Te Greenhouse Community Garden would be sited in a city-owned field behind a municipal greenhouse, a less- than-bucolic setting surrounded by an old chain-link fence and next to a dollar-store parking lot, in full view of a dumpster. As in a growing number of similar projects across the US (see sidebar, “Community Gardens—All Varieties”), members would work all season to grow veg- etables using natural methods, then share in the bounty.
Above (clock- wise from top): Krista Bailey gathers farmers to divvy up the harvest; laboring over the lettuce bed; a bite of yel- low tomato; ripe tomatoes; the author and her kids, Ethan and Hannah, search for ripe squash
Opposite: Ethan enjoys a lemon cucumber.
May–June 2010 |
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