Spring Comes to the Community Garden: Sugar Snap Peas and Sanity
by Whitney Brown, UNC graduate student in Folklore & Community Gardener at the future MLK, Jr. Park, Carrboro
Whitney (left) and Leslie install a wire trellis for the sugar snap peas.
I’ve been paying close attention to the weather. We all have. We’ve been in severe drought for longer than I can remember. Our lakes have been sad deserts, dotted sporadically with little mud puddles. Carrboro remains in Stage 3 water restrictions. It wasn’t long ago I heard Durham had only sixty days of water left, Raleigh not much more. If the local story has been grim, the global story has not been much better: melting polar ice caps, erratic weather patterns, and climate change filled the headlines of major US papers until primary season began to heat up. Each unseasonably warm winter day gives me global warming hypochondria, grateful though I am for temporary breaks in the frigid monotony. And that’s just the weather! Gas prices, suicide bombers, failing peace agreements, nuclear proliferation, the limping US economy, Sudanese genocide, Chinese contamination, domestic hate crimes… It’s been a long winter, and spring cannot get here quickly enough. Luckily, February has already brought the dual relief of rain showers to parched soil and warm Saturdays even to the coldest of weeks. Now, March is here, and the forecasts mercifully promise more rain to fill our gauges, cisterns, and reservoirs. A break in the drought would be one less thing to worry about.
Two of the community gardens youngest weeders, Casey (left) and Logan sample the wild onions.
For the last month, we’ve been preparing the beds. We’ve weeded. And weeded. And weeded. We’ve shaped and mulched. We’ve enriched the soil with composted “sweet stuff,” as Jay says, using our spades to skim it up from the pathways and onto the beds. (“It’s like a rich, moist chocolate cake,” he says.) One of our most experienced gardeners, Jay is a frequent teacher of new gardening skills and practices to newcomers, which we have practically every week. With his kind, careful guidance I am becoming a gardener. After only a few Saturdays, I understand how to make a good bed. Names and faces–of people, vegetables, and weeds alike–become more and more familiar to me each week. I enjoy the work and am confident in my new skills. Today, however, our tasks will be different. March is here, and spring planting begins. Jay told me weeks ago that our first seeds would go in the ground on March 1, and I have been filled with anticipation ever since. We could be planting crabgrass and I’d still be excited. To think that I’ll be eating what we grow is strange and fascinating.
Unfortunately, after a Friday night house party in celebration of the leap year and International Mustache Month, I awake feeling less than excited about the arrival March 1. Uncharacteristically sluggish, I linger around the house that morning with my coffee and my electronic New York Times. Piddling around in my bedroom, I miss a call from Natalie on the world’s least audible cell phone. She left me a voicemail that saying she couldn’t come to the garden that day, so she’d need me to take care of measuring, spreading, and documenting the sea solids, which we use to naturally amend the soil’s mineral content. I am only too happy to oblige, especially since Natalie gave me over two hours of her Sunday night less than a week ago for my project. I believe in reciprocity, particularly since my involvement with the garden is intimately tied to my search for community in Carrboro. I’m pleased to finally involve myself in something meaningful and, in the process, meet people who aren’t just like me: twentysomething graduate students who celebrate things like International Mustache Month.
Knowing that I have to take care of the sea solids, I have a renewed sense of purpose, so I hurry up. Already thirty minutes late, I finally step out my screen door into another shockingly gorgeous and temperate Saturday. My attitude quickly changes for the better. The night before, I’d worn my ski jacket as I walked to the party with Josh! Now, I have on short sleeves and SPF 50. I race up Hillsborough on my bike, hoping that my gloves don’t fly out the back pocket of my jeans and wondering how we’ve been lucky enough to have such beautiful Saturdays for a month straight.
By the time I arrive, people are already putting seeds in the ground with smiles on their faces. The smell of moist dirt catches my nose, coming to me on a light breeze. It’s sunny and quiet except for chatter among gardeners and birds. A pack of cyclists zips by, taking advantage of the beautiful weather. The chalkboard by the gate is filled with information about today’s work. We’ll be putting in spinach, carrots, and peas, and Sammy is today’s Queenbee (leadership position for which someone from the pool of gardeners volunteers on a rotating weekly basis). Jay, always the most cheerful, welcoming, and energetic of us all, greets me warmly even though he’s battling a nasty cold. Though he’s been looking forward to planting for weeks–as long as I’d known him, actually–he was going to have to leave early that day to wrap up a long, drawn out move, all while sick. We lightheartedly commiserate, agreeing that the older you get and the longer you live in a place, the more stuff you accumulate and the longer the move takes. Jay isn’t his usual self, but I feel an extra energy–maybe an air of excitement–among everyone else in the garden on that particular day.
Our reasons for excitement are many. Certainly I can’t speak for everyone, but with my own hands in the dirt, I feel a tremendous sense of historical continuity, as if we’re performing an ancient seasonal ritual. In fact, we are. Spring planting, timed to coincide with the first signs of gradually increasing sunshine and warmth, is a hopeful time. We hope that the frost will not return to kill our seedlings, but more than anything, coming out of winter–seeing the light at the end of the cold, dark tunnel–is such a relief, even here in the mild Southeast. The crunch of frost disappears from underfoot. Birds sing again. Days generously lengthen. Leaves return to the trees and the flowers begin to color our world once more. Energy and optimism return to those of us they left months ago when winter set in. And soon enough, we’ll all be eating the freshest vegetables, herbs, and berries you can get.
I like to plant, but I love to weed. Not everyone does. Checking the charts and chalkboard in the midst of sorting out the sea solid business with Sammy, I take note of which beds need to be dealt with. Many were weeded and mulched in the preceding weeks, but some remain untouched. I hone in on Bed 3, which will be getting sugar snap peas today. It’s a small bed, maybe fifteen feet long, near the front gate. I don’t know what grew there last year since we rotate crops to prevent soil exhaustion and I’ve yet to decipher rotation patterns, but it already has a tall metal framework of stakes dividing the bed down the middle lengthwise. The peas will climb this as they grow. From where I stand at the gate, I can see bed is weedy, but when I actually get started raking off the mulch, I realize that there isn’t much to this bed at all but weeds and a massive amount of mulch. Underneath it all, Bed 3 itself is puny. It’s narrow and shallow. The soil is more like clay than any bed I’ve worked in the last month. My work is cut out for me. This bed needs love, or our peas are in sad shape indeed. Everybody else is busy planting or planning, so I just get to work without interrupting them.
I painstakingly pull out wild onions, digging deep with my gloved fingers to get the roots that like to break off and then regenerate to mockingly greet you the next week. Grabbing a spade, I begin to forage for better soil in the pathways around the bed. I raked so much uncomposted mulch off the bed to begin with that I now have to be careful not to throw any of that back on as I rebuild. I need rich, black, moist dirt to counter all that light brown clay, but the mulch is piled up everywhere, and I get frustrated. Who put all that mulch on there anyway? What were they thinking? Too much of a good thing applies in the garden too, you know. But I quickly check myself for my lapse into negativity, reminding myself that this is a space for people to learn, and at least those people were here to help in the first place, whoever they were. It wasn’t long ago I had no clue what I was doing, and nobody criticized me…
“What can I do?” asks a new guy a few yards behind me. “Oh…,” Sammy replies as he surveys the garden for suggestions, “actually, see what she’s doing over there? That’s a great idea. Grab a spade, and skim off that top layer of black dirt and throw it on this bed…” Indirect as it is, that’s praise from Sammy to me. Since he is one of the most experienced and authoritative of all the gardeners, his words make me feel even better about what I’m doing. I’m proud that I had a good gardening idea on my own. For once, nobody had to tell me to do it. I feel like a real gardener for the first time since I started.
Before long, I see that Bed 3 is heaping with sweet stuff, and I put the spade aside for someone else to pick up. I try to work with a rake to spread the soil, but the metal frame in the middle proves a major hassle. Forsaking the tools, I bend to my knees to rebuild the contours by hand. It’s a slow process, and this is where the bed gets the extra love it badly needs to make it wider, healthier, more coherently shaped. Soon, I being to feel a special attachment to Bed 3, as if it were my special corner of this cooperative community garden where everything is everyone’s. I patiently work my way around the entire bed, sometimes scooping up more black earth from the pathways, and completely focused on the task right in front me. I am determined to do it well and completely, and I know that I will succeed.
Graduate school, on the other hand, feels like one interminably incomplete thought (not to mention application process), a massive unfinished task looming over me at all times. I love what I do and know I am in the right place, but my eyes are getting fuzzy and my hair is turning grey. Some days I am so tired I can barely carry on a conversation. And there’s always more to read. Everything seems to come at the expense of my sleep, and I’m barely keeping my head above water. By contrast, the garden is full of small, manageable tasks that can actually be completed. Raking, hoeing, weeding, digging, planting, watering, and mulching a bed to perfection in the span of a few hours gives me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment I can’t seem to find anywhere else just now. The ability to act and affect is powerful and reassuring in a world that is so often overwhelming to me these days.
The garden brings me peace in a way few things can. Lying alone on a beach as the waves wash across the sand and the breeze swirls around me. Sitting on the dock with old friends, dangling our toes in the water as the sun sets across the lake, bringing down another thick summer night. Reading in new spring sunshine on the deck at my parents’ house (the only house I knew until I was eighteen). Watching the sunrise from a car somewhere on a state highway, coffee in hand. Situating me firmly in the landscape and reminding me of the sublime rhythms of nature, sunrise, sunset, seasons, and tides have been happening for eons, and they will continue with or without me. These are the moments in my life when the details melt away, and I am acutely aware of the importance of such moments and the perspective they bring. My body relaxes. Something swells in my chest. I breathe slowly and deeply. I become nothing above and beyond my senses. I am in awe of the universe and my place in it. On the best of days, the garden takes me to this place, and I linger there as long as I can. Some come to the garden to grow affordable, organic food for themselves, some to make a political statement, some to teach children and neighbors, some to see friends, and some for the simple love of gardening, but I am here for my sanity. Bed 3 grounds me, and after thirty minutes working alone on my hands and knees, I am done.
“You wanna do the honors?” Sammy asks encouragingly. While I had stepped away from Bed 3 for a few minutes to measure and spread sea solids in other areas of the garden, Sammy had come in behind me to to cut in the sea solids and feathermeal and then form the furrows for the sugar snap peas with his rake. “You did such a great job on this bed, you should do the planting,” he says. Jay, still here even though he said he’d have to leave early, enthusiastically agrees. I notice that I’m as pleased as a kid receiving lavish praise for bringing home straight A’s or coloring inside the lines. It’s an odd feeling–embarrassing almost–and it hadn’t occurred to me until now how little praise we get as adults. I ask Jay a few apprehensive questions about spacing before taking the waxy paper cup full of partially rehydrated peas and placing them gently into the earth. It’s a simple process, but I do it with great care. Even spacing, proper depth, no wasted seeds or space.
And then it was over. The peas were in the ground, and the soil was tamped down over them with front edge of the rake’s teeth to “tuck ‘em in,” as Jay says. Bed 3 was staked and labeled. I feel exhausted and tranquil. Now, there’s nothing to do but wait. 14 days, to be exact. In the meantime, I wonder, did I do it right? Will they sprout properly? How green is my thumb? Are the sea solids at the proper ratio? Most of all, will I feed my fellow gardeners? Just now, I cannot know, but I have reason to hope. We all do.