blog (January, 2007)
Urban Harvest Garden Tour 2007
Saturday was one of those adventure days I enjoy so much.
I bicycled to eight gardens on the Urban Harvest Garden Tour. Met good people doing good work, transforming (mostly-)urban lots into fertile vegetable gardens, to feed themselves, their families, and their communities.
Re-learning, teaching, growing.
Some (like the Barkwill/Doloff Community Garden, above,) are transformations of once abandoned lots.
The community garden maintainers I spoke with seemed less interested in expanding their own gardens than in suggesting that Clevelanders interested in doing the same:
- find an abandoned lot in their hood,
- ask their councilperson to support its reclamation, and
- get started, with help from Summer Sprout:
Summer Sprout is a collaborative effort between OSU Extension and Cleveland, through the Division of Neighborhood Services, Department of Community Development. Community gardens registered with Summer Sprout receive vegetable seeds and plant starts, soil preparation services such as plowing and rototilling, assistance in getting fire hydrant permits and equipment for watering, and garden fertilizer and leaf humus.
Growers keep their vegetables for themselves or to share. The rest of the produce goes to area hunger centers and agencies.
For details, 216-429-8246.
-- Community gardening sprouting up all the time in the Cleveland area (The Plain Dealer)
To know that Summer Sprout consists of some 170 gardens in Cleveland is inspiring. To see just a few of them and meet the people behind them, even moreso.
I've put all the photos I took in a set on Flickr: Urban Harvest Community Garden Tour 2007. The descriptions list which garden they're from, and each photo's location is geo-tagged; look for the map link.
Maurice Small Meets the Bloggers
I knew from brief encounters at Fresh Stops that Maurice was righteous ripe, just not which flavor. Urban farmer, bearded dready in overalls, quiet riot. Softspoken, some, but unabashed, deliberate, wry.
George opened Meet the Bloggers: Maurice Small posing to each participant a baited question Maurice had previously delivered: what are you eating?
The details aren't important. The key is your connection with your food. It gets juicy when you go beyond traceability. Link with the land, the people involved. Don't just know where it came from, know intimately. It'll taste better in every dimension -- tongue and soul.
(If you are what you eat, and you don't really know what you eat...)
Maurice had some rants prepared, but didn't quite get to finish them. His love is children and growing food, and he's learned to follow his heart. There are kids who think milk comes from jugs, and eggs from cartons -- and he's reconnecting them.
The hour was up too soon for everyone, but I get a sense that any interaction with him would leave a person filled but hungry for more.
trace your food's past
Asked twice in one day last week why I'm vegetarian, I found that my usual answer -- that I want to be a little more responsible -- might come off as presumptuous. So I'm thinking of adding because I'm lazy to it, to balance it out.
The only (rare) prayer I'll say alone before eating is to contemplate the lifespan of each thing I'm about to consume. Garlic, bean, rice: imagine seeds being spread, fertilizers applied, guy in overalls on tractor, machines grinding and packaging and loading and delivering.
More unknowns and unpleasantries with an animal on the plate (what was it fed, and where did that come from?) stretch contemplation duration while the food cools. I'm a hungry fool.
I'm lazy, and I want to be closer to the source.
take responsibility for [your] food -- no matter what it is -- by tracking its path back to the sun. If you can face the path of your food in full knowledge and be at ease with it, then happy eating!
-- Kevin Kelly, [Review of] The Omnivore's Dilemma (Cool Tools)