Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (4 page)

My tomatoes would not cure the pain or make me feel less lost, but it was the best I could do on a dark day when the Seattle skies cried along with me. Putting a plant in the ground is an investment in the future—even if that future is only tomato season a few months away. You are saying you think you'll be around to water those plants, to eat their yield, to enjoy what they may produce. In the midst of uncertainty, it is an act of faith.

That day I planted hope, tender and green.

I
HADN'T HEARD OF
the Boeing Bust until I moved to Seattle, but I soon learned the details. In the late sixties, with government spending on the Vietnam War and the Apollo space program drying up, Boeing found itself heavily leveraged. The aerospace company was the largest employer in the area, and the resulting layoffs devastated the local economy, leaving Seattle with the highest unemployment rate in the country. Tens of thousands lost their jobs; so many people fled the city that local U-Haul dealerships ran out of trailers. A billboard was put up near the airport that read
WILL THE LAST PERSON LEAVING SEATTLE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS
. Dark humor for darker times.

This was also the era of the back-to-the-land movement, across the country. These two forces inspired a young student at the University of Washington to action. In the midst of economic woes and environmental concerns, Darlyn Rundberg Del
Boca decided to plant a garden. Like my mother, she thought it important that kids know where their food came from. She also wanted to grow vegetables for Neighbors in Need, a precursor to the local food banks. Jobs and paychecks in Seattle were vanishing overnight; people were hungry.

In the months that followed, Del Boca convinced the Picardo family, owners of a truck farm in northeast Seattle, to let her use one of their fields. The city agreed to pay taxes on the property, and the teachers and students at a nearby school volunteered to tend the land. Families who helped were given small plots for themselves around the perimeter. It was the beginning of what would become the city's community gardening program.

I had heard about these gardens even before I moved to Seattle. They were called P-Patches in homage to the Picardo family. While I was still living in San Francisco, I'd read newspaper articles about how so many people in Seattle wanted to garden that there were waiting lists for community garden plots. It seemed hard to believe at the time.

By my second spring in Seattle, still living there only part-time, I considered myself one of those people. I had reached capacity with my tiny side garden and had begun casting my eyes at the embankment below the deck. It got only morning sun, but buttercups grew there, thick and lush. If there was enough sun for weeds, surely there was enough for vegetables.

Emboldened by my success the summer before, I carved out a strip of earth from the hillside using a pitchfork and shovel. The soil was rich and dark, and I got giddy with the possibilities. I would plant broccoli! Cauliflower! Kale! Leeks! All things are possible at the beginning of a gardening season.

At the nursery the next day, I bought the season's first vegetable starts. The leeks were threadlike, fetal versions of the vegetables they would grow to become. The kale and cauliflower were sturdier, textured leaves spouting upward. I nestled them
into the dark soil, planting their plastic tags beside them, though clearly the leaves of the cauliflower looked nothing like those of the kale.

Then I went out of town. It was March but I wasn't worried—the vegetables would be watered by the rain. I couldn't wait to see how much bigger they would be when I returned. All things are possible at the beginning of a gardening season.

I came home from my two-week trip late at night, but by first light I was outside, still in pajamas, scrambling down the steep and muddy slope to check my vegetables at the bottom. How big had they grown?

Vegetables?
What vegetables?
I couldn't find them.

I searched along the strip of soil I had cleared but saw nothing. The plastic tags were still there, but the sprouting starts had vanished. All that was left were a few nubbins of stem. Any tender leaves had been nibbled into oblivion.

This is how I learned that buttercup makes excellent slug habitat—and that slugs have a taste for kale. I couldn't believe the destruction. The hillside belonged to the slimy creatures. I had to come up with another solution.

The back deck that overlooked the buttercup hill also overlooked a house down below. I didn't know those neighbors, but in winter when the trees lost their leaves, I could see into their yard. There was a deck, a path, and four raised garden beds just sitting there.
Four raised garden beds
.

It was more space than I had ever dreamed of, and I itched to plant them with peas and radishes and tender lettuces. The things I could grow with four whole garden beds! The Commandments warn us not to covet our neighbors' wives; they make no mention of their raised garden beds.

Would it be weird to ask if they were going to use them?

Maybe they had installed them in a fit of ambition but had later grown tired of gardening. Maybe the beds had been there when they bought the house and had never been used. Desperation
makes us concoct all sorts of crazy schemes—and this was my first taste of gardener desperation. I could offer to rent their beds from them, or share what I grew. There had to be something that could be done.

I pondered my plan for a few days, until I woke up on a Saturday to the sound of digging. I ran out on the balcony and saw a man wearing a straw hat spading up the beds I had dreamed of working myself. As the day went by, I watched him weed and plant and do all the things I wanted to do.

I moped for a week or two, looking balefully at my small gardening area. It seemed such a disappointment after I'd envisioned flat land and full sun. What had given me great happiness the summer before, what had seemed like such an upgrade over my crooked window boxes in San Francisco, no longer satisfied me. I wanted more.

Something needed to be done.

The year before I had taken myself on a tour of the P-Patches. There was a waiting list for plots, and I'd wanted to apply early, to be ready. Before I sent in my application, I decided to survey the scene.

There was a steep bit of hillside on Phinney Ridge, with a view of snowcapped mountains, that had been terraced into cascading garden beds—I could only imagine the work it had taken to build on such a slope. There was a sunny plot attached to a pocket park near Green Lake, and a tidy spot in Ballard that featured a demonstration garden. I took my toddler niece with me on that last visit. We looked curiously at ruby-colored stalks of rainbow chard and the lacy fronds of carrots.

The garden I liked the best, however, the one I could imagine myself part of, was the original Picardo Farm in the northeast section of the city. It was large—more than two hundred plots. The year-round gardens featured berry bushes, grape trellises, and other perennial plantings. The summer plots offered a seasonal lease, after which time the gardens were dismantled,
plowed, and sown with a cover crop to enrich the soil. Because of the size, I assumed it would have a decent turnover. In the smaller gardens, I suspected that someone would need to move away or die before you could get a plot.

In the midst of my garden frustration, a postcard arrived welcoming me as a new member of the P-Patch program, assigned to Picardo Farm. My planning had paid off.

One Saturday in April I attended the orientation for new gardeners. I looked curiously at my fellow newbies: families with small children, a few older folks, some young. Though we spanned the age range and a few ethnicities, everyone had the hearty look of a Seattleite, dressed in rain slickers and fleece. I wondered about the other thing we all shared—whatever mysterious thing made us want to grow food.

There were other people at the orientation, returning gardeners who had been at Picardo for years. There were benches dedicated in memory of gardeners who had passed on. I'd heard of three Picardo marriages: relationships that had started over a row of peas or chard. I was charmed by a place where such things might happen. I was still new to Seattle, still trying to find where I might fit in, still deciding if this was my place. A garden seemed like a good spot to find community, or to grow it.

What was harder to find that first day was my Picardo plot. I stood on the sidewalk overlooking the farm and tried to align the map I had been given with the grid in the garden below. Picardo Farm was set below street level and took up the better part of a block. I wondered if people driving by had any idea of the small garden city down below.

The side of the garden that held the seasonal plots looked like a gold rush boomtown that April morning. String and poles measured out paths on bare earth: Here were the trails. Here were the garden plots. This was your land to tend. We all had a claim to stake that early-spring day.

Returning gardeners were already at work, building trellises,
marking paths. Some of the more ambitious had decorated with flags or banners—though this might have been to help them find their plots again in the maze. All the plots looked the same: flat brown soil newly turned up. Each had that rich smell of good earth, like a forest floor, primal and fecund. I looked at the ten-by-twenty-foot plot that was now mine.

The emptiness was daunting. Always before, I had gardened around obstacles: poor sunlight, a sloping hillside, other plants already in place. Restrictions made decisions for you; they narrowed options. The idea of a flat and sunny plot, a blank slate, was overwhelming. It was intimidating. Where to begin? I had no idea how to start a garden.

I should have known what I was doing. I had watched my mother garden for most of my childhood. But when I close my eyes, I see cherry tomatoes, cornstalks, green beans, a plum tree laden with fruit. There must have been early-spring days full of seed packets and mud, but I don't remember them.

I looked at the returning gardeners, already working their plots. Some were covering the soil with black plastic—presumably to kill weeds, though perhaps also to warm things up. I imagined the black plastic would attract the heat of the sun. April in Seattle is still too cold to plant many things.

Other people were even more industrious. A few were working with wooden frames spread with coarse mesh, using them to sift out lumps and rocks from their plots. The resulting soil looked like fine powder, but what a hassle! I couldn't imagine sifting through two hundred square feet of what was already better soil than I had ever gardened in.

I couldn't imagine much. Should I plant seeds? Should I buy starts? Should I build a trellis? And what to plant? Too many questions; I didn't have answers.

Instead, I did the only thing that made sense to me in the moment. I looked around, tried to orient my plot so I could find it again, and I fled the scene.

Earlier that year, before I had been assigned to my P-Patch, I had attended a presentation on permaculture, though I didn't really know what that word meant. I went because I was new to the city and attending a lot of things, casting my net wide. I was idly curious but not serious. I assumed it was a type of gardening: organic, biodynamic, permaculture.

As I sat listening, my interest was sparked. Permaculture was about gardening, but not only that. It was a methodology for creating sustainable human development—it dealt with growing food, of course, but also water issues, waste management, building homes, creating energy. Instead of depleting our resources—as most human activity does to some extent—we could design systems that were truly sustainable and even regenerative. People were already doing this around the world.

Using a mixture of age-old wisdom, the study of nature, and new science, permaculturalists were creating perennial gardens and food forests with nearly unimaginable yields. They were designing systems that allowed food to grow in desert areas with almost no rainfall. They were building houses that reused water and barely needed heating. Growing up in the environmental movement, I had been told all my life that we were on a course bound for certain devastation. Permaculture was the first thing I'd heard of that sounded promising, seemed hopeful. I left that day, my mind abuzz, and soon signed up for a six-month training course in this methodology I barely understood.

Permaculture would teach me how to plan and plant a garden, I was sure of it. But on that April day at Picardo, I'd only had one class; I still didn't know anything.

As spring rolled into summer, however, I began to learn. In my weekend classes, we studied how to start seeds, to plant in “guilds” so each plant was compatible with its neighbor and would grow strong. I learned how to landscape in a way that
channeled rainwater where it would be most useful. We built trellises and dug a pond and calculated the amount of rainwater that could be harvested off the roof of a house.

My garden was a reflection of these early lessons. Instead of square beds, I made curving paths to maximize my planting area. Instead of rows, I planted more naturalistically, with strawberries tucked along the edges, lettuces behind, and chard to the rear where it could grow tall. I scribbled everything down in a notebook, for fear I might forget what I had put where. There were few straight lines in permaculture. It was a wilder, less obvious system.

As my gardening knowledge grew, so did my P-Patch. I was always amazed at what had taken place since my last visit. Pea shoots unfurled and began to climb the tepees of bamboo poles I had built (two of them, so my nieces could each have one to hide in). Purslane sprouted, and strawberries flowered, and an unidentified tomatolike plant that had volunteered began to thrive. When it sprouted flowers and small, round green fruit, I assumed it was some sort of Thai eggplant, but the fruit was bitter and never seemed to ripen. This is how I learned that potato plants produce fruit above ground as well as spuds down below.

There were disappointments as well. The tender arugula I started from seed was nibbled into lacy patterns by something called a flea beetle. The basil refused to sprout, the beans were similarly reluctant. But one day I harvested a handful of radishes, another handful of peas, and three whole strawberries and felt triumphant. I had planted a garden!

All around me the plots were growing. There was a field of basil across the path and the most beautiful kale I'd ever seen one block over. Pole beans twisted up trellises, and tufts of corn stood guard in straight rows. There were green pumpkins that would turn orange, papery husks of tomatillos, long green cucumbers, fat purple eggplants. It was a feast of colors and scents in the garden that summer. That grid of bare earth had become
a patchwork quilt of food and flowers, all reaching upward toward the sun.