A month ago now, Maine got a heaping of snow with us getting +1′ and Mike and I were off to Seattle for business and for tagging along. It was a nice break from the sticks, with everything in walking distance, all the vegan goodies via Whole Foods I could want and people watching. I came back to Maine with an appreciation for the quiet, my puppies and an awful head/chest cold that didn’t let up until the week before Christmas.
Despite my woes I found an emerald among the urban sprawl.
A few blocks behind our hotel, past a variety of food genres in the forms of trucks and holes in the walls, was this messy yet delightful community garden. As someone who’s spent most of their winters in gray, bitterly cold and snowy New England winters, seeing so much green in December was a feast for the eyes. Taking a quick tour in the rain, it was fun seeing how things were laid out and what permaculture principles could be applied.
With it being December and all, flowers are hard to come by but a few calendulas, nasturtium, dill and borage buds and broad leaves have stuck around. Flowers and herbs were scattered everywhere with no real plan, which is great! Nature isn’t rigid and this approach in an city based garden seems to be working well as there’s a lot of variety in the areas that are sectioned off from one another.
An aspect of gardening we suburban and rural folks use as well is finding a purpose for an item that might get tossed otherwise. This was clearly a consideration in this space as there were many ramshackle structures for fencing, garden beds and climbing plants, as well as rain collection and scarecrows. While paths may look cluttered and informal, letting grasses and clovers help fill in where wood chips and pavers lay is a passive way to improve biodiversity. Cardboard was also omnipresent, used for grass and weed killing, prepping an area for more soil or compost or creating new paths. Understandably, rain collection was taken seriously in this garden as there is quite a bank of barrels. I don’t know the specifics of their catchment system but it being done in an imperfect way is good enough for me. Another sign of permaculture principles is a biomass generation area, aka compost bays. While using pressure treated lumber isn’t the best material to use, having an area to collect, rotate and use compost as close to the garden as possible is an excellent way to cut down on time, energy and material waste.
With it being winter, most plants were done for the year and quietly decomposing between pavers or getting picked at by birds. Others were lush and healthy and looked ready for lunch.
Of course corn and sunflowers were the easiest to discern as their tall, lanky stalks stick out in the city. Packed into beds and redistributed by birds, strawberry leaves were wide and vibrant, slowly working their way throughout the garden. The known superspreader mint was thriving in an otherwise dormant bed providing an uplifting scent when you got too close. Broad comfrey leaves were also in many beds, living up to its name as the powerhouse of the garden. I’m sure they will be chopped and dropped in areas that need soil help and start anew in the spring. Dramatic and bloody chards were used in a lot of beds as borders and really stuck out around moss, strawberries and chickweeds. Towards the middle of the garden was this grape vine and crumbling arbor it had taken over.โA future project of mine is to do the same thing at home so seeing it done in the city was encouraging.
Overall, this was such a nice find in the city and I’m glad I spent some time looking around and getting ideas. It’s also a great example of a program to encourage communities to garden together and pool resources, which can be hard to find for some in city or even suburban settings. Any level of gardening as a skill may prove handy in the uncertain climate changes we’re heading towards so this can only be seen as an investment in the future.
