Grange Community Garden

Two groups of students came to the garden this week - twice the fun, twice the confusion - the same awesome effort on the part of the next generation.
I won't bore you with the grueling details but we busted more sod, started a compost pile, tillied in the cover crop and mounted beautiful kid-made prayer flags on the deer fence in honor of May day.
It was a lovely, sunny day. The cold winds mostly drifted high overhead, and we missed the worst of the cold that plagued the other garden sites where the rest of the kids worked. Another good omen for the Grange Community Garden. Wind is the second most loathsome garden pest in Port Townsend following deer. Shelter from the wind is a great blessing and it takes so long to get if you don't already have it.

The Jefferson Community School students have so much energy - they could easily form the bakcbone of a successful garden. Until they showed up most of our volunteers were my age - at least. It's nothing personal, some of my best friends are my age, but we don't really have the sustained energy required for a start-up garden. Besides we're all too busy.

The last community garden I worked at in Port Townsend was on the corner of F and San Juan, by the golf course. You would have been hard pressed to pick a more difficult site. Kah Tai valley was a lot windier back then - trees were fewer and farther between. The garden bore the brunt of all of the winds, and all of the cold summer breezes from North Beach. tucked in at the bottom of the valley - it was in a cold pocket and prone to frosts.
All of those minor inconveniences were nothing compared to the nasty soil. Where you would expect to find good bottom land soil, we had to contend with a landfill. Lots of gravel, chunks of concrete and asphalt. In some places it was like taking out a parking lot and putting in a pardise - only the aspahalt was buried under six inches to a foot of what passed for soil at our garden site.

Back then I was young and dumb, even so, I had enough sense to know we were crazy. I never would have got involved if I hadn't got paid. That's right I got paid to grapple with tilted-windmill by the Ferderal Government. This was back in the eighties when your federal tax dollars were put to work in your community supporting do-gooders and young folks with ideas and/or lots of energy.
There were community gardens all up and down the West Coast. All of them different, all of them cool. A major chunk of my generation of West Coast organic gardeners were trained at community gardens funded in part by CETA, the WPA of its time. These gardens were an amazing community resource - they not only fed the body, they fed the soul as well.

Tinker and I met at a Bio-dynamic / French-intensive teaching and demonstration garden started by Alan Chadwick. We started out as apprentices. It was an excellent progam that covered a wide range of gardening experience.
I learned more about plants and life in Saratoga community Garden than I did working at Brookside Botanical Gardens in Wheaton Md. where there were extensive grounds, a serious library and several horticulturalists on the staff.

The Grange Community Garden competes a full circle in my life. A gardeners life is full of circles of all different sizes. If all goes well, the longer the life the larger the circles.

Maybe I should be sharing with you more of the details of our fabulous day at the garden but my mind is stuck on the big picture right now - which starts with finishing the garden fence, getting water to the garden and asking Tinker what to do next. Keep this under your hat but I haven't had a serious vegetable garden for a longer than I care to tell you, and when I did, I mostly relied on Tinker for the details like when and what to sow. I'm a landscaper by trade or at least I was until the rheumatoid arthritis kicked in.

Here's the latest version of what I know, or think I know, or have decided to make up until I know something better. Julie Marston and Missey Miller, teachers for the Jefferson Community School are very excited about the program. We have already started talks about next Fall and a possibly expanded program. Looking foward to next school year, it would be nice to plant some crops for the kids to harvest then - to illustrate one of the basic seasonal circles of the garden.
Of coures, lurking between now and next fall lies the dogged-days of this summer. I have visions of Sebastian spending a summer of quiet exile, diligently plugging away at his work. I have other visions of Sebatian swimming, playing video games or whatever it is, kids do these days.
I know I sound like a pessimist and a nagger but that's my job. I've been constantly putting the brakes on this garden until we can find all of the necessary ingredients for success. More garden projects fail from expectations outracing available energy and resources, than anything else.
Sebastian already has experience with a garden project that didn't make it - a build-it-and-they-will-come scenario that didn't pan out. Sometimes the best plans of mice and men go astray.

Now I'm not opposed to failed projects. At one time Milo Redwood and I were seriously considering starting a failed business. We noticed that some of our favorite places in Port Townsend had disappeared - in particular /Circa 1912, /a Victorian reading room which was more or less a beautiful living room downtown and a nice, quiet place to hang out. We had an innovative business plan: we planned for failure instead of success. We failed so fantastically that we never opened the doors.

So I'm not opposed to failure on principle, as long as no one gets hurt and a good time is had by all . People jumping out of sky scrapers, wars and famines definitely cross the line - but we can learn from our smaller failings.
We just had an awesome mistake when we were tilling the Grange garden. Last week we forgot to sew two sections of deer fencing together and a small corner of deer fencing had drifted with the breeze into the area where we were tilling.
The fence got tangled in the tiller blades, the tiller stopped and one of our nearby, chintzy but cheap fence-post-extenders snapped off. As a child I was taught to freak out and get my excuses lined up whenever I was within spitting distance of a mistake.
My attitudes about mistakes changed when a Japanese gardener told me mistakes were god's way of telling you to slow down. Since then I've quit fleeing my mistakes and learned to enjoy them. Most of all I ever learned, I learned from a mistake. I look foward to making many future mistakes.
The kids were surprised by how unfazed I was. They figure out all of the possible horrible outcomes and all the good reasons for feeling miserable over our mistake, but I shot them down one by one.
Meanwhile the kids figured out all of the steps necessary to untangle the tiller - they learned from their mistake. They totally had to figure it out for themselves - it was obvious I wasn't going to help them - I was too busy not worrying about it..
Besides it might be cheating, if I help too much in this garden made by kids. So far.

When we first started talking about a community garden, we got countless offers of land to work. There are lots of people looking for someone to put in a nice garden on their property. While most of these offers were generous (some of them were blatant attempts to exploit some free labor) - they missed the point - we have too much land and not enough workers.
It turns out labor, and not money as some would expect, is the bottleneck in our project. Let's do the math. We can start with the old contractors equation that are three things and we can only have two of them - time, money and quality. If we can find a legal source of abundant inexpensive labor then we're in like flint - we can have both cheap and good.

I know what you're thinking: we could cut quality. Believe me I've tried it and it won't work in this situation - take my word for it - we're stuck on the quality issue.

It turns out what we need most of all is a willing labor force. Underline willing. If you'v ever tried to get a kid to take out the trash or work in the family business, you will know what I mean. It's also true for many adults. In my former incarnation as a landscaper I had to wake workers up, drag them to the job-site, pay them at lunch time so they could eat, and hold them at shovel point to keep them on the job after lunch.
In the non-profit business willing is not enough. Most non-profits are blood-suckers. Never get involved with a non-profit - they'll steal all your time and energy until you are a dried-up, empty husk, cast off in the weeds of an emptyt lot, broken-hearted and disillusioned. Since the Grange is a non-profit we should make every effort to make sure a good time is had by all and that we do no harm.

What does the Grange Community Garden have to offer young people? What do young people like that is cheap, wholesome (mostly) (at least under some adult supervision) and readily available? Other young people is the correct answer. This also dovetails nicely with the community part of community gardening - encouraging people to spend time in the garden and at the Grange.
I put out some feelers - tested the waters - for other summer interns for the garden. It became apparent that we would need a critical mass of kids to attract kids of quality. We would save ourselves buckets of trouble by finding kids who actually like each other. If this was school we could probably resort to a mild form of coercion - do it or you won't pass. We're stuck with sweeter ways.

We ran in to a snag with one of our potential garden interns. I found out quickly that her parents were well aware of thier child's worth in the garden. In fact they had plans that she would work in the family business.
I'm currently working on a suitable bribe to offer her parents. I can't tell you the details just yet - I don't want to jinx the deal - but part of the proposal involves having two of this child's friends working at the garden.
One of the friends is not only a good worker but brings certain intangibles to the project that I can't mention yet as I don't want sour the deal. Securing these kids would score major bonus points for the garden.
The goal is to create an atmospere where the kids look foward to their time in the garden.

If all of this is starting to sound a little convoluted to you, all I can say is you're getting the Cliff's Notes version. These are just a few highlights of the the various twists and turns and tangents - we've taken to get this garden project off the ground. Or should I say on the ground? It has only been a few months since Missey Miller came to one of the Grange Garden meetings looking for a place for her students to gather garden knowledge. We've been improvising like crazy ever since.