Inner City Farmer

With my own garden growing increasingly haggard and brown, I set off early Saturday morning in search of a little inspiration, and I found it (as well as enough veggies to feed an army) on Caswell Avenue just a mile southeast of my house. I had heard all about Suzie and John Warren’s garden; if you live in Austin and have any interest at all in gardening it would be hard not to.

Less than six months old, the garden has become something of a mecca for gardening enthusiasts. John Dromgoole, the organic gardening guru and owner of the Natural Gardener, recently filmed it for his “Backyard Basics” segment on KLRU’s Central Texas Gardener. Garden designers from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center have stopped by to take a look. Even UT students have taken an interest; one of them took pictures of it for a photo assignment, which was judged to be the best in a class of over 400 students. It is also the first vegetable garden to be given a Green Garden Award by the City of Austin. In all, over 200 people have taken a tour of this garden, and on Saturday I joined their ranks.

What makes this garden so special? Not only is pleasant to look at, it also produces a ridiculous amount of food. Whereas so many gardens in Central Texas are now withering in the heat, the Warrens’ garden is—to use Suzie’s word—“boomin’.” For the past two and a half months, it has supplied enough vegetables to feed Suzie, her husband John, her son, his wife, two other couples in the neighborhood, and an assortment of friends. What’s their secret? How have they succeeded where so many others have failed? That’s what I was hoping to find out.

I was amused to discover that the yard where the garden sits was once riddled with lugustrums and hackberry trees, just as mine is now. With help from some of their neighbors, the Warrens chopped down all of these trees, and then sent a soil sample off to the Soil, Water and Forage Testing Laboratory at Texas A&M. They discovered that, like most lots in Central Texas, their soil was high in phosphorous but otherwise safe for gardening.

Next they had two truckloads of soil from Garden Ville dumped on their yard, which they used to make a raised bed nearly a foot high. (In retrospect, they would have preferred to have purchased the soil from the Natural Gardener as the soil from Garden Ville contained some dreaded ragweed.) To keep the garden well watered, they installed a drip irrigation system hooked up to four 75-gallon rain barrels that collect rain water off their roof. Because the rain barrels are only about two feet off the ground (see picture), they don’t always produce enough water pressure. As a remedy, local permaculture expert Dick Pierce recommended the Warrens buy a “sprinkler hose” from Breed & Co., which at such low pressure would act just like a soaker hose.

This all seemed like fairly standard operating procedure so I pressed Suzie a little harder. Her garden looked like an oasis in a desert. When I visited, it was at the peak of production. There were big, fat, round, healthy fruits and vegetables everywhere I looked, eggplants as purple and shiny as Barney’s forehead, watermelons and cantaloupes begging to be smashed and feasted upon, chard as high as my knee. Carrots? Check. Beans? Check. Only the tomatoes looked a little off because some pesky stink bugs had found them.

I pressed Suzie for the secret to her success. She suggested cottonseed meal, which they had spread liberally throughout the garden. But I knew that wasn’t it because I had done the same. Finally, after retrieving a little boom box from inside the house, she produced an answer that satisfied me: music. Since the garden’s inception in the spring, she has been playing music for her plants every day. She swears they like Wilson Pickett the best.

Here’s the toughest part about trying to create a completely sustainable environment in an urban setting: I have neighbors on all four sides of me, and not all of them think the way I do. My neighbor directly to the west of me has caused me the most grief. For a while there we maintained a civil neighborly relationship. We borrowed things from each other. We talked over the fence. We even drank beer together on occasion. But from the outset there were signs that our connection would not grow any deeper.

We simply don’t see the world in the same way. First, he dropped off a container of toxic chemicals on my front porch and suggested I nuke my backyard with it in to get rid of the mosquitoes that plagued us last summer. Then he asked to borrow a piece of particle board to use as a backstop so that he could shoot the opossum that lives in our neighborhood. But the last straw came the night he laughed at me for believing in global warming. I fled his house in horror, but he wouldn’t let it go, emailing me the following morning. “If you have any facts to backup [sic] your ridiculous position, I’m all ears. I know you haven’t a clue, so I’ll respect that and leave it where it is. And now I’ll leave you with a simple thought… the polar ice caps on Mars are melting at the same rate as on earth, yet no CO2 emissions, SUV’s, evil rich, or coal-fired power plants exist on that planet. Ask one of your egghead experts about that one.”

Curious to discover what the hell he was talking about, I researched the matter and found that he was quoting from a story in National Geographic about Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, who attributed the simultaneous warming of Earth and Mars to changes in the sun’s heat output. What my neighbor didn’t mention was that Abdussamatov’s radical theory was quickly refuted by every leading climate scientist in the world, including Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England’s Oxford University. “His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion,” Wilson said. “And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report.” I didn’t speak to this neighbor for six months.

We have since reestablished a neighborly relationship, but every time I smile at him across the fence it’s through clenched teeth. We not only see the world differently, evidently we speak different languages too. Last week, he told me he wanted to chop down a tree that was on his property but hung between our houses. His reasoning was that the opossum used the tree to climb on to his roof. I told him I didn’t think he should do it, that I wasn’t an advocate of cutting down any trees, and certainly not one as beautiful as this one. It was a Texas redbud, which sports beautiful pink flowers each spring. I used to enjoy staring at it from my kitchen window, but I won’t be doing that any longer. Yesterday at 6:30 in the morning, my neighbor destroyed it with a chain saw.

It’s hard to see ourselves for who we truly are. It must be some biological thing. When we sing in the shower, we think we sound great. When we have b.o., we never seem to think we smell as bad as we really do. I am no different. I think my house looks like the coolest place ever. I mean, I’ve got an arch for an entrance and I just increased the square footage of my house by like 30 percent, using mostly natural materials and doing all the work myself.

But then there are those days where I see the mess I’ve made and have yet to clean up–just look at all that sand! I see the junk I’ve stacked up along the side of my house, waiting for a use that will keep it out of the landfill. I smell the stink emanating from the sand pile in front of my house because my cats think it’s a giant litter box. These thoughts, this doubt, were racing through my mind as I went to introduce myself to Chris and Megan, who just moved in two doors down from me. “They must think I’m a real freak,” I was thinking as I said hello.

But instead of scorn or judgment this is what came out of Megan’s mouth instead: “Do you think you could teach me to do that sometime?” She was pointing at the front porch I made out of cob. You’ve got to love it when that happens.

“Sure,” I said. “I can teach you as soon as I start building a cob tool shed in my backyard.”

Now that I have have some help I am more excited than ever to start that project, but first I need to finish plastering the exterior of the wall of the room that was a garage and is now called The Man Cave. I put a second coat on today, this one sandier, smoother, less prone to cracking. It’s looks pretty damn good, but that opinion is based on my own vision and could be slightly prejudiced.

The chicks I got in late March are now nearly full grown. They’ve been living in the same coop as the three older hens for about the last six weeks. They have a separate “den,” essentially a box made out of scrap particle board with cinder blocks covering the entrance, where they can eat their own food (first “grower” and now “developer”) in peace and escape the hens’ wrath. To get inside the den, they sneak through and around the cinder blocks, something the fat old hens can’t do.

One of the funniest things about my five chickens is that they are all different breeds. I have a Wyandotte, a Black Australorp, a Rhode Island Red, a hatchery-created breed called an Ideal 236, and a Polish Crested, which might be the freakiest-looking chicken of all time. Here’s a close-up of its face, as seen through a cinder block:

As my garden continues to burn out and fade away, I have become even more dependent upon eggs for sustenance. Much to their credit, my hens are producing, usually at least two eggs a day. In fact, I’m getting a little sick of omelets. Who’s up for a trade?

Self-Sufficiency Meter: 30%

While my garden dies a slow and painful death, it’s nice to know that some vegetable-producing plants in Austin are doing well. Earlier in the week, a member of the Austin Permaculture listserv I belong to spotted “several tomato and pepper plants growing among the perennials at the foot of the pedestrian bridge [that spans Lady Bird Lake] on the northwest side.” There was immediate speculation as to the origins of the plants.

One member thought they were part of a demonstration garden for the Green Corn Project, a local nonprofit whose mission is “to educate and assist Central Texans in growing organic food gardens.” This seems likely—on the website they do mention having a garden on Lady Bird Lake.

But the revolutionary in me loved the speculation that it might have been planted by a guerrilla gardener. If you’re not familiar with this movement, guerrilla gardening entails planting vegetation on abandoned or unoccupied tracts of land generally under cover of night. The more brazen do it right in the middle of the day. The goals of these stealth plantings are as varied as the personalities of those performing them. Some do it to grow crops they might one day eat. Some do it to beautify a scarred piece of land. Many are making a statement about land ownership, questioning its legitimacy.

In America the movement has a long, if not glorious, history dating as far back as the first decade of the 19th Century when John “Appleseed” Chapman started planting apple orchards all across the Midwest. The modern origins of the movement have been traced to Liz Christy and her Green Guerrilla group, who in 1973 transformed a neglected lot in the Bowery Houston area of New York into a beautiful garden.

I find it telling that one of the greatest acts of subversion one can commit nowadays is planting some seeds on someone else’s land. If you’re brave enough to do it and keep it up despite public pressure not to, you just might become as famous as Richard Reynolds. I applaud all those who are willing to try.