We began to shed our hurly-burly suburban skins in exchange for something a little softer, a little slower, a little more in tune with the demands of the farm.

Community Gardens

Growing Our Own

By Mark Winne

Here I have been these forty years of learning the language of these fields that I may better express myself.

-- Henry David Thoreau

eing the hardy and self-reliant people we think we are, Americans harbor a belief that when all else fails, we can always return to the soil for our sustenance. Should the oil run out, the trucks and trains stop running, and the far-flung global food network crumble into dust, the land and our instinctive ability to coax food from it will save us. At least this is the folklore we fall back on, a wisdom passed from our pioneering ancestors, whose skill, knowledge and work ethic we would have to channel in order to truly live off the land again. Having witnessed many sincere but ultimately failed attempts to transform dirt, water and seed into food, I tend to look somewhat askance at those who suggest that more of us, if not all of us, and especially the poor, should "grow their own." Whether we invoke the agrarian spirit of Thomas Jefferson, the sod-busting pioneers of the Iowa plains, or the Victory Gardens of World War II, our claims of self-reliance teeter closer to myth than reality.

Cutting My Teeth on Youth Gardening

In spite of my own hard-earned lessons about food self-reliance, I still find myself holding fast to a belief that gardening and small-scale farming carry their own special virtues. Just out of college and having barely survived my own adolescence, I assumed the directorship of a municipally run youth program in Natick, Massachusetts, located just west of Boston. Not wasting time on a warm, Welcome Wagon greeting, the town fathers advised me that if I wanted to have a job in six months, I'd better get "those damn kids off the street." Appropriately motivated, I scouted the region for "revolutionary" youth-program ideas that, if replicated in Natick, would assure me a long and prosperous career. Fortunately, I stumbled across the Green Power youth farm in Weston, whose young people had found refuge from the mean streets of one of Massachusetts's most affluent communities by picking beans on town-owned farmland.

Following two months of hectic planning I, and a motley assortment of volunteers, officially started the Natick Community Farm one chilly April morning in 1975. Resorting to a press-gang form of youth outreach that would be highly frowned upon today, we had rounded up 20 or so teens from juvenile police officers, school disciplinarians and priests. We spent the first few hours shoveling horse manure from a local stable into town trucks that would haul it to a donated two-acre parcel of land owned by the local Audubon sanctuary. Knowing even less about youth supervision than I did about farming, I quickly lost control of the situation. After only an hour, my band of would-be agrarians were hurling great waves of fresh manure at each other.

To compensate for my lack of knowledge, I had managed to find a farm manager who had just graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a degree in agriculture but had no practical farming experience. We worked in the field together that first year, he standing with a plant science textbook in his hand and the youth on their knees in the dirt trying to implement his instructions as he read them aloud. Our inexperience and the demands of dealing with an endless stream of adolescent issues did not allow at first for a peaceful communion with nature. Our stress levels were further elevated by the promise I had made to the young people that they would be paid from the proceeds of the farm's produce sales. If we didn't make money, the young people would leave. If the young people left, the program would fail, and I would be looking for a new job.

For once, ignorance paid off. Knowing nothing about the correct use of agricultural chemicals, the Natick Community Farm became organic by default. And as luck would have it, the short distance to Boston gave us access to that city's small but growing organic-market niche. If we could produce organic fruits and vegetables of respectable quality, we could sell them to Erewhon Natural Foods Store for a pretty penny. And by some miracle, we managed to cultivate a righteous patch of organic cantaloupes for which Erewhon was willing to pay top dollar -- if only we could deliver them ripe and ready to eat. The farm manager's college textbook, however, did not tell us how to determine when cantaloupes are ripe. Each day we waited in a heightened state of anxiety trying every trick we'd heard of to assess their maturity. After one particularly long day of thumping, sniffing and squeezing melons, I lay my weary head down on my pillow only to be awakened at 3 o'clock in the morning by my frantic wife, who was yelling, "Stop it! Stop it!" I asked what was wrong, and she said, "You're squeezing my ass and shouting, ‘Are the melons ripe? Are the melons ripe?'"

But it was in those stony New England fields sloping gently down to the banks of the Charles River that my communion with nature became communal. Collectively with my young charges, we began to shed our hurly-burly suburban skins in exchange for something a little softer, a little slower, a little more in tune with the demands of the farm. Subconsciously, we began to model ourselves after the cranky old Yankee farmers who would stop by to visit. They would share stories about our field that made me believe that their knowledge predated the Pilgrims. "April's too wet to plant," they'd assert, pressing their huge, leathery hands firmly on their hips. "It means May will be too dry," they'd predict, squaring their immense bellies off against me, thereby deflecting any attempt to question their certainty.

Before long, we started walking and talking like them. "The frost will come early this year," one 16-year-old crew leader told me, drawing on her entire two months of agricultural experience for her prediction. Another young worker, who had earlier that season screamed at the sight of his first worm, confidently forecast a better fall broccoli crop than last year, even though he hadn't been there the previous fall. Our knowledge may have been shallow, but we were discovering the unique gifts that small-scale farming can bestow. Like Thoreau, we were "learning the language of these fields" so that we might express ourselves more fully in our present community and beyond.

Community Gardening in Hartford

Energized by my experiences in Massachusetts, I went to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1978 to head up the newly formed Hartford Food System. My intentions matched those of the organization: to provide the benefits of gardening and healthy food to a place that suffered from a paucity of both. The first of many Hartford gardens that I would help develop was in the city's Bellevue Square neighborhood. Unlike middle-class Natick, Bellevue Square had some of the harshest demographics in the Northeast -- desperately poor and crime ridden, and a poster child for every failed urban redevelopment scheme in America. Its only visible asset was an abundance of vacant land, which was no more than a sorry testament to failed attempts to build something on it. The fact that the residents expressed a desire for a community garden suggested how universal the human craving for a little patch of dirt is.

On the day of their first community work party, I joined the residents, the only white face in a sea of black ones, determined to demonstrate that I would toil with them to reclaim this godforsaken piece of ground. Among the gardeners were many elderly African American men and women, most of whom had roots in the rural South. While they couldn't do much heavy lifting, they provided many lifetimes of gardening advice to the younger people who could. One stout female elder, who stood as tall as I in spite of her severely stooped shoulders, would later be the first person to give me a bunch of collard greens, but only after I listened carefully to her cooking instructions.

I enjoyed being there, but soon realized that I was just one more well-intentioned white guy who had to learn that Bellevue Square was not his place. It belonged to the people who lived there and who used their hodgepodge assortment of tools to make it a little better. I was welcome to provide resources, even to bring newspaper reporters by to write clichéd stories of how this poor community was planting the seeds of its own revival. But the residents of Bellevue Square had their own rhythm. As the sons and daughters of southern sharecroppers, they had a richer store of agricultural knowledge than I did. The garden flourished and won the city's best garden of the year award. The gardeners taught me how to grow and prepare collard greens, and I gained satisfaction from watching them succeed on their own terms.

The language and dreams of urban garden enthusiasts often suggest that rubble-strewn deserts can be made to bloom. Although something approximate to this happens occasionally, the reality has generally been less paradisiacal. Granted, a little patch of green sprouting in a harsh urban landscape is desirable for many reasons, not the least of which is the relief it gives the eye. But as many veteran urban-garden organizers readily admit, these ventures rarely make a significant contribution to a community's food security.

That being said, it has proven worthwhile for communities to commit to providing land, horticultural training, soil and compost, and other means of support to enable those who want to garden to do so. Whether we are motivated by the myth of self-reliance, the fear of a cataclysmic event, or simply the wish to make something ugly into something beautiful, society should permit each of us to stand in humble repose on our own tiny plot of land and to make what magic we can of it. Doing so affords us the opportunity to experience for ourselves the pulse of the seasons marked by the productions of the earth.

This piece was excerpted from Mark Winne's book Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, published by Beacon Press, to be released in January 2008. Available from local bookstores as well as online at www.amazon.com and www.beacon.org. Visit Mark's website, www.markwinne.com, for updated information about the book, signing events, etc.

Mark Winne will be speaking and signing books in Santa Fe on Saturday, January 26, at 3 p.m. at La Montañita Co-op, 913 West Alameda Street, and in Albuquerque on Saturday, February 2, at 11 a.m. at La Montañita Co-op's Nob Hill store, 3500 Central SE.





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	We began to shed our hurly-burly suburban skins in exchange for something a little softer, a little slower, a little more in tune with the demands of the farm. Community Gardens Growing Our Own By Mark Winne Here I have been these forty years of learning the language of these fields that I may better express myself. -- Henry David Thoreau eing the hardy and self-reliant people we think we are, Americans harbor a belief that when all else fails, we can always return to the soil for our sustenance. Should the oil run out, the trucks and trains stop running, and the far-flung global food network crumble into dust, the land and our instinctive ability to coax food from it will save us. At least this is the folklore we fall back on, a wisdom passed from our pioneering ancestors, whose skill, knowledge and work ethic we would have to channel in order to truly live off the land again. Having witnessed many sincere but ultimately failed attempts to transform dirt, water and seed into food, I tend to look somewhat askance at those who suggest that more of us, if not all of us, and especially the poor, should "grow their own." Whether we invoke the agrarian spirit of Thomas Jefferson, the sod-busting pioneers of the Iowa plains, or the Victory Gardens of World War II, our claims of self-reliance teeter closer to myth than reality. Cutting My Teeth on Youth Gardening In spite of my own hard-earned lessons about food self-reliance, I still find myself holding fast to a belief that gardening and small-scale farming carry their own special virtues. Just out of college and having barely survived my own adolescence, I assumed the directorship of a municipally run youth program in Natick, Massachusetts, located just west of Boston. Not wasting time on a warm, Welcome Wagon greeting, the town fathers advised me that if I wanted to have a job in six months, I'd better get "those damn kids off the street." Appropriately motivated, I scouted the region for "revolutionary" youth-program ideas that, if replicated in Natick, would assure me a long and prosperous career. Fortunately, I stumbled across the Green Power youth farm in Weston, whose young people had found refuge from the mean streets of one of Massachusetts's most affluent communities by picking beans on town-owned farmland. Following two months of hectic planning I, and a motley assortment of volunteers, officially started the Natick Community Farm one chilly April morning in 1975. Resorting to a press-gang form of youth outreach that would be highly frowned upon today, we had rounded up 20 or so teens from juvenile police officers, school disciplinarians and priests. We spent the first few hours shoveling horse manure from a local stable into town trucks that would haul it to a donated two-acre parcel of land owned by the local Audubon sanctuary. Knowing even less about youth supervision than I did about farming, I quickly lost control of the situation. After only an hour, my band of would-be agrarians were hurling great waves of fresh manure at each other. To compensate for my lack of knowledge, I had managed to find a farm manager who had just graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a degree in agriculture but had no practical farming experience. We worked in the field together that first year, he standing with a plant science textbook in his hand and the youth on their knees in the dirt trying to implement his instructions as he read them aloud. Our inexperience and the demands of dealing with an endless stream of adolescent issues did not allow at first for a peaceful communion with nature. Our stress levels were further elevated by the promise I had made to the young people that they would be paid from the proceeds of the farm's produce sales. If we didn't make money, the young people would leave. If the young people left, the program would fail, and I would be looking for a new job. For once, ignorance paid off. Knowing nothing about the correct use of agricultural chemicals, the Natick Community Farm became organic by default. And as luck would have it, the short distance to Boston gave us access to that city's small but growing organic-market niche. If we could produce organic fruits and vegetables of respectable quality, we could sell them to Erewhon Natural Foods Store for a pretty penny. And by some miracle, we managed to cultivate a righteous patch of organic cantaloupes for which Erewhon was willing to pay top dollar -- if only we could deliver them ripe and ready to eat. The farm manager's college textbook, however, did not tell us how to determine when cantaloupes are ripe. Each day we waited in a heightened state of anxiety trying every trick we'd heard of to assess their maturity. After one particularly long day of thumping, sniffing and squeezing melons, I lay my weary head down on my pillow only to be awakened at 3 o'clock in the morning by my frantic wife, who was yelling, "Stop it! Stop it!" I asked what was wrong, and she said, "You're squeezing my ass and shouting, ‘Are the melons ripe? Are the melons ripe?'" But it was in those stony New England fields sloping gently down to the banks of the Charles River that my communion with nature became communal. Collectively with my young charges, we began to shed our hurly-burly suburban skins in exchange for something a little softer, a little slower, a little more in tune with the demands of the farm. Subconsciously, we began to model ourselves after the cranky old Yankee farmers who would stop by to visit. They would share stories about our field that made me believe that their knowledge predated the Pilgrims. "April's too wet to plant," they'd assert, pressing their huge, leathery hands firmly on their hips. "It means May will be too dry," they'd predict, squaring their immense bellies off against me, thereby deflecting any attempt to question their certainty. Before long, we started walking and talking like them. "The frost will come early this year," one 16-year-old crew leader told me, drawing on her entire two months of agricultural experience for her prediction. Another young worker, who had earlier that season screamed at the sight of his first worm, confidently forecast a better fall broccoli crop than last year, even though he hadn't been there the previous fall. Our knowledge may have been shallow, but we were discovering the unique gifts that small-scale farming can bestow. Like Thoreau, we were "learning the language of these fields" so that we might express ourselves more fully in our present community and beyond. Community Gardening in Hartford Energized by my experiences in Massachusetts, I went to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1978 to head up the newly formed Hartford Food System. My intentions matched those of the organization: to provide the benefits of gardening and healthy food to a place that suffered from a paucity of both. The first of many Hartford gardens that I would help develop was in the city's Bellevue Square neighborhood. Unlike middle-class Natick, Bellevue Square had some of the harshest demographics in the Northeast -- desperately poor and crime ridden, and a poster child for every failed urban redevelopment scheme in America. Its only visible asset was an abundance of vacant land, which was no more than a sorry testament to failed attempts to build something on it. The fact that the residents expressed a desire for a community garden suggested how universal the human craving for a little patch of dirt is. On the day of their first community work party, I joined the residents, the only white face in a sea of black ones, determined to demonstrate that I would toil with them to reclaim this godforsaken piece of ground. Among the gardeners were many elderly African American men and women, most of whom had roots in the rural South. While they couldn't do much heavy lifting, they provided many lifetimes of gardening advice to the younger people who could. One stout female elder, who stood as tall as I in spite of her severely stooped shoulders, would later be the first person to give me a bunch of collard greens, but only after I listened carefully to her cooking instructions. I enjoyed being there, but soon realized that I was just one more well-intentioned white guy who had to learn that Bellevue Square was not his place. It belonged to the people who lived there and who used their hodgepodge assortment of tools to make it a little better. I was welcome to provide resources, even to bring newspaper reporters by to write clichéd stories of how this poor community was planting the seeds of its own revival. But the residents of Bellevue Square had their own rhythm. As the sons and daughters of southern sharecroppers, they had a richer store of agricultural knowledge than I did. The garden flourished and won the city's best garden of the year award. The gardeners taught me how to grow and prepare collard greens, and I gained satisfaction from watching them succeed on their own terms. The language and dreams of urban garden enthusiasts often suggest that rubble-strewn deserts can be made to bloom. Although something approximate to this happens occasionally, the reality has generally been less paradisiacal. Granted, a little patch of green sprouting in a harsh urban landscape is desirable for many reasons, not the least of which is the relief it gives the eye. But as many veteran urban-garden organizers readily admit, these ventures rarely make a significant contribution to a community's food security. That being said, it has proven worthwhile for communities to commit to providing land, horticultural training, soil and compost, and other means of support to enable those who want to garden to do so. Whether we are motivated by the myth of self-reliance, the fear of a cataclysmic event, or simply the wish to make something ugly into something beautiful, society should permit each of us to stand in humble repose on our own tiny plot of land and to make what magic we can of it. Doing so affords us the opportunity to experience for ourselves the pulse of the seasons marked by the productions of the earth. This piece was excerpted from Mark Winne's book Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, published by Beacon Press, to be released in January 2008. Available from local bookstores as well as online at www.amazon.com and www.beacon.org. Visit Mark's website, www.markwinne.com, for updated information about the book, signing events, etc. Mark Winne will be speaking and signing books in Santa Fe on Saturday, January 26, at 3 p.m. at La Montañita Co-op, 913 West Alameda Street, and in Albuquerque on Saturday, February 2, at 11 a.m. at La Montañita Co-op's Nob Hill store, 3500 Central SE.