Today was a beautiful day to spend time in the garden. I mostly just wanted to take time today to sit and reflect on all the work that we’ve done in the garden. I took my camera and a thermos of green tea and sat for a bit on a cement block and just took it all in.
When I first started working in the garden back in July, two of the beds were covered by a tarp, weeds were everywhere, and the squash and tomato plants had yet to become unruly. Josie and I took evening walks to the garden to water the plants and catch frogs and marvel at the tomatoes that were starting to grow. The garden felt like our special corner of the world, its charm balanced by the sense of responsibility I felt towards turning it into something truly productive.
From the middle of August through October we were super busy – weeding, amending beds, planting seeds, more weeding. And during that time, thanks to all that hard work, the garden really flourished. It took a couple weekend workdays, but we managed to clear out most of the weeds and covered the paths with cardboard, burlap bags, and woodchips and all of a sudden the garden felt like a new place. We gradually rolled back the tarps and planted more vegetables and seeing those sprouts come up out of the dirt was so exciting and gratifying in a way, really the best feeling.
And even more rewarding than seeing plants grow under our care was getting to harvest them! Over the weeks, we took home squash, carrots, string beans and bags of tomatoes! When the leadership team passed this role to me in the spring, I couldn’t have imagined the amazing success we would have later that fall.
As a community space, many people in the neighborhood would pass by the garden on their walks and it was nice to invite them to help themselves to the tomatoes or tell them about the garden. It felt good to spread even that little bit of friendliness and positivity. Even though the garden as a club didn’t really take off as I had hoped, what we were able to accomplish with just a few people dedicating a bit of their time every week to this small plot of land still makes the effort worthwhile.
All in all, it’s been really cool to work in a garden again and kind of overhaul it, make it an actual functioning garden from the mess of grass and weeds it was before. Even though there are three of us who lead the club, managing the SLUG Garden feels like a passion project to me – figuring out what needs to get done each week, what should get planted, making plans for the future. And I really couldn’t have accomplished half of all of it without Josie and Alysha’s support and Clara’s enthusiasm.
Now that we’ve got one semester under our belts, I’m really looking forward to coming back in the spring and trying to get more crops going. I’m ready to try the lettuce and spinach again, maybe some more beans, some other herbs. And I hope that with the university planning on bringing back a thousand students to campus, we’ll actually have participants show up to our club meetings. I’m looking forward to doing bigger projects and sharing the garden space with more students.
I’ve already talked about why I think gardens are important particularly in the context of people interacting with nature. But after this semester, I’ve experienced how much purpose working in a garden has given me and I think that could be really meaningful for other people. Especially while we’re in the middle of a pandemic and the future is murky and we’re stuck inside. We take refuge indoors, in our homes where we are in control, for the most part. We grow houseplants to bring the outside in and we just look to the outdoors for inspiration and escape and comfort while still trying to keep it at bay. Even if it’s just helping to weed or plant seeds, that direct involvement and sense of contribution to a group effort and then getting to take home produce to eat could be exactly what people need to bring something new into their lives.
