It
is often said that to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. On
Sunday, April 1st, a group of volunteers, civic leaders and friends,
out of shared belief in tomorrow, gathered to launch a “future-based”
enterprise; namely an organic vegetable garden at the backyard of the
Community Day Center in Waltham, MA. The same optimism can be said of what drives our work at the Day Center. It is the belief of the human spirit.
Mayor Jeannette
McCarthy of Waltham, MA, cuts the ribbon to the new vegetable garden at the
Center
There
are many reasons why a vegetable garden is a good undertaking for the Community
Day Center. It provides affordable and
healthy food for our guests, it brings a bit more nature into our backyard,
and it provides regular and purposeful activities for our volunteers and guests alike. Over the course of this growing season, this blog will track the
progress of the garden -- the planting and the harvesting, the encounters with
weather, weeds and pests, the expected and unexpected joys and challenges (many
of us are still sore from Sunday), the back stories, the manifestos on food
politics and discourses on sustainability, of course, the food we are able to
share at the table. Perhaps we will even
hold a naming contest or enter a competition to grow the fattest tomato.
For
this first installment, we simply want to share with you why we garden. We
garden because we believe that beginning with efforts today we can produce
something delicious and bountiful tomorrow (OK, more like in six months). This is what we call hope. Gardeners, like community centers, must
find their actions rooted in hope. Yet hope cannot be sustained if our future is
not sustainable. That is why the Center
works with Healthy Waltham and Brandeis - Hunger and Homeless students and Day Center board and guests - to plant an organic garden, making productive use of
limited, otherwise overlooked urban space without depleting or degrading
natural resources. On Sunday, our
future-based enterprise placed 3 cubic feet of organic top soil on a newly
prepared 8 ft. by 20 ft. lot, on which three rotations of organic vegetables will
be planted from Spring through late Summer (more on the crops in upcoming
blogs). In this small place, we hope to see
future as sustained integration of “natural systems with human patterns and
celebrates continuity, uniqueness and placemaking.” (See http://www.arch.wsu.edu/09%20publications/sustain/home.html).
Nina Rogowsky
of Healthy Waltham instructs student volunteers from Brandies University
on basic
garden preparation
We
garden because we relish in the garden’s orderly progression from a starting
point of vacant potentiality to a conclusion of bountiful productivity that is
visible, purposeful and can be shared (see the “before,” “during” and “after”
shots of the garden below).
Michael Pollan wrote, "The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical
process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere
animal biology to an act of culture" (from
In Defense of Food: An Easter’s Manifesto, http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food). At the Center, we share a meal every Monday
through Friday. We depend on good and
fresh food to bind our community.
Finally,
we garden because we get misty-eyed when we remember Marcel Proust’s words, "Let us be grateful to people who make us
happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
Here is the result of our labors on Sunday, April 1:
Before...
During...
After...
No comments:
Post a Comment