Yet Another New Blog: The 200 Foot Garden

I know it seems a little crazy, but I've started yet another new project that requires its own blog. I'm working on creating a commuter garden in my neighborhood--sort of a cross between a community art and community garden project. It still might not come together completely, but you never know. It's something that's worth a try, and no matter how it turns out, it'll be an interesting experience.

You can check out the blog at The 200 Foot Garden.


P.S. Besides gardening, I actually am getting some writing done. I'm revising my new middle-grade novel, one chapter at a time (while also trying to balance a freelance gig at the same time).

Farming on my mind: "The One-Straw Revolution" and "You Can Farm"

I just finished two great books about farming (and food and business and life).

The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka is a classic text, written in 1978. He was a pretty amazing guy (long dead now, I’m sure), both a farmer and philosopher. I’m really interested in his Do-Nothing Farming method, which utilized ground covers and mulching and eschews tillage. He’s dedicated to having the farm and crops being in great alignment with nature (Nature with a big N, meaning seasons, predators and pests, native plants, etc.). I’m curious to know if anyone in the Northeast U.S. has duplicated his methods, with crops that would grow here. His dual-season crop rotation works well for where he lived in Japan, because he could grow a grain crop in the winter, and then the mulched each crop (rice in summer, or rye and barley in winter), with the straw of a different crop, so that the diseases/pests that come were not automatically passed to each successive crop. His use of white clover as a perennial ground cover ended up enriching the soil, sort of like green mulch/fertilizer. Timing is everything with his method, especially in terms of combating weeds.

He talks a lot about zen philosophy, too, about being and meaning and nothingness, which I also enjoy considering. But it’s about a lot more than that, and he’s practical, too, in his considerations about what herbicide and pesticides are doing to the people, animals, plants, and the world.

What’s interesting is that he wrote all this more than 30 years ago. There is a big wave of this now, but people have been worried and trying to take action for decades now. Maybe now, it’ll really grab hold.

I also read You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise
by Joel Salatin. (Tracy posted about him and his book on her blog, too.) As one of many folks who fantasize about living on farm someday, this book was both entertaining and enlightening for me. Salatin's "stacking" methods, of rotating various animals across his fields, with the proper timing to allow build-up of the soil and great reduction in pests and disease, is so cool. I'd love to try it for myself (though I have no interest in raising any animals on my farm beyond chickens, to be honest) just to see it in action.

Just as much as his farming methods, I appreciate his great energy and enthusiasm (and tremendous libertarianism) for the business side of farming. He's thought hard about how to make money from his ventures on the farm and refuses to price himself into starvation (he generally doesn't do projects that generate less than $25/hour). He makes his decisions about what to farm and what to sell from smart, considered business perspective.

Though this is a book about the business of farming, it's a good fun business book for anyone, especially writers, I think. Farming, like writing, is more than just a job, it's a way of life, and if you want to keep that way of life, you need to find a way to make your living from it. And like farming, that's all a lot easier if you live an especially frugal life. He talks a lot about making sure that you don't go into debt at the wrong time and making sure that you are clear about your necessities versus luxuries. The same applies for writers. He writes about making the transition to farming gradually, i.e. you might not want to quit your day job and buy property until you've already got customers. The same thing applies to people who want to support themselves through writing.


Both of these two books dovetail nicely in their thoughts about the importance of eating healthy food grown in a natural method that does not harm the earth. I'm all for that.

Maybe it's time for Tracy and me to go through our seed catalogs and start getting ready for our spring garden.

Life Imitating Art. And not. Pumpkin Patch vs. Cabbage Patch

My play Pumpkin Patch is now available from Playscripts, which is very exciting. (Everyone should immediately go buy a copy. It's in a collection of plays, so you'd actually get all kinds of good plays, even though you're really just after this one really good Gabridge play.)

The play is about two people in a community garden--one of whom is the coordinator and catches a woman stealing pumpkins. There's a big dust up, drama all around. No one comes out looking particularly good. I like it because it's a play where people get to smash things on stage, which is fun for everyone.

So today, my son and I rode our bikes to our community garden. It was the first time we'd had two days of sunshine in a row in almost forever. We had a great ride (in our family, we tried to determine everyone's superpowers. Noah's is riding his bike. Mine is that I'm very good at falling asleep--watching TV, reading books, typing on the computer, watching plays). Sun shining overhead. Not too hot. Birds singing. Flowers blooming.

I took my little preliminary tour of our 12' x 27' plot, just to admire it and check for problems, before starting to harvest cucumbers and tomatoes. And I stopped right at the path's edge. There was a hole in the ground where there used to be two very pretty heads of cabbage growing. There was one left of the three that we'd grown, but two had been stolen.

I ranted and railed. What kind of person steals from a garden? Why did they have to take two? I mean, if they were really, really hungry, I could have spared one. But they took a long time to grow. Two? There was a twisted off tap root from one of the cabbages, still fresh. The thief had been there this morning.

"Call 9-1-1," my son advised. He's eight. I had to explain the police might be busy solving other crimes with higher priorities than my missing cabbages. He was a little put off by this, but then gave a big pirate roar and said that if he was a policeman he'd catch the thief and put him in a jail with bees. So the thief would get stung. This sort of punishment can come to mind, I suppose, when there are bees buzzing about, busy pollinating squash.

In Pumpkin Patch, the garden coordinator's mantra is "Don't Plant Pumpkins!" That's what she tell her gardeners, because she knows they'll have their hearts broken. "Plant zucchinis, plant green beans, but don't plant melons, don't plant pumpkins." She's both right and wrong, of course. The gardeners will get their hearts broken, but if they don't plant pumpkins, then nobody gets any pumpkins, and everybody loses. (Confession: when I was coordinator of this garden, I used to issue the same warning, but slightly more gently.)

I never thought to have her say, "Don't plant cabbages." Who steals cabbages?

Unlike in my play, there was no scoundrel at the garden with a bag full of two perfectly round heads of cabbage. Just me, shaking my head and muttering.

The nice thing was that for once, I'd already written and thought about all this. A lot. At least enough to write about it and to be involved with two productions of the play. So I had plenty of practice making up scenarios for why someone would do this and how they should act. Who knew being a writer might actually pay off someday.

I picked the remaining cabbage. (At least they left me this, right?) It could have grown bigger, but it's beautiful and big enough for a meal for our family. (Watch out, kids.) I picked a few tomatoes showing pink, too, because I find tomatoes more tempting than cabbages, myself, and my faith in humanity was just a little tarnished.

But I'll plant more cabbages next year. And today, once I was done harvesting and then planting new seeds of chard, spinach, lettuce, and beets for my fall crop, I weeded the garden of some friends. They're busy and have two small kids and the plot was desperately overgrown with grass and bindweed and other good sized chokers. So I filled up bucket after bucket of weeds until you could see the eggplants again and smell the dill and thyme.

There wasn't anything I could do to get my cabbages back, or keep them from vanishing next time, but I could at least make sure that somebody will have a pleasant surprise the next time they visit the garden. That helped a lot.