Cornucopia
Two Triangle Gardens Grow Crops - And Communityby Linda Frye Burnham
Got a deal for you. How would you like to help stop world hunger, strengthen the local economy, help solve homelessness, build community, beautify the city and improve your family's health--by focusing on something you already do every single day?
Benjamen Harman, Emily Tysinger and Harvey Harman in the lettuce patch on their Chatham County Farm. Photograph by Walt Tysinger
I'm talking about eating.
I've eaten all over the world, but here in the Triangle I've found more people intensely dedicated to healthy food than anyplace I've been--intersecting communities obsessed with nutrition, organic farming and sustainable agriculture. I could put you in my car and take you from urban garden to country farm to farmer's market to food co-op to community meeting without breaking the flow of conversation about composting, cover crops, soil-building, crop rotation, beneficial insects, mulch and manure. For many of these people, such conversations are like prayer, and organic growing is like religion. They believe they have found a rounded life that literally feeds itself.
Two community organic growing projects--Seeds in Durham and Walk Softly in rural Chatham County--are different approaches to group dreaming about good living for everybody.
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Despite valiant efforts to revive Durham's downtown, in the neighborhoods and industrial districts nearby there are still boarded-up buildings and vacant lots full of trash and broken glass--signs of a struggling economy, rising crime and poor management. .
But right up the street from the main Post Office, at the corner of Elizabeth and Gilbert, there are signs of life. There are men, women and children working among beds of vegetables and flowers, a greenhouse, a huge bamboo cornucopia with young tomato plants climbing its sides, and a tall weathervane, visible all over the neighborhood, proclaiming the name of the garden: SEEDS.
Seeds is a small organization with a big mission: to help bring neighbors together to reclaim vacant land and create a new, shared vision for that space. Headquarters is the Phoenix Garden Project on Gilbert Street, established on a site leased for $1 a month from the Southern States farming cooperative. The garden is across the street from Phoenix House, a halfway house for homeless men. Last year the Garden Project partnered with Phoenix House to begin "helping men transition out of homelessness" by offering practical training in horticulture as a valuable work experience and marketable skill. With the help of a small staff, a few grants and the largesse of local businesses and growers who contribute plants and seeds and advice, the garden is rising. Thanks to the hard work of Garden Director Will Atwater and his gardeners, the first crop of kale and kohlrabi and snowpeas has found a market: Nana's Restaurant in Durham.
"The chef came down from the kitchen in his apron to inspect the crop," Seeds Executive Director Ann Kenan told me excitedly. Customers, in fact, are lining up, including Crook's Corner and Henry's Bistro in Chapel Hill. On the first Thursday afternoon in June, the Phoenix Garden Project will take part in the opening of Year Two of the Durham Farmer's Market on Orange Street.
In addition to the Phoenix Garden Project, the Seeds Community Harvest Program provides advice and aid to community gardens elsewhere in the city. The gardeners have worked with Shirley Caesar Court (seven homes built by Habitat for Humanity), as well as the Burch Avenue and Woodridge community groups. The project also plans to build a raised planting box at Eastwood Group Home for people with mental challenges.
Will Atwater was jumping with nerves when I met him several weeks ago at the Phoenix Garden. He was carefully covering his kale to protect it from marauding insects, worried that its robust beauty would be gone before the spring celebration several days later. His face captured a seriousness I have seen in every farmer's face, evidence of constant vigilance and apprehension.
Atwater was a young landscape gardener in Greensboro a few years ago when he lost interest in the work. A trip to New York and a visit to a community garden there awakened something else in him. "I went from somebody who wanted to be in business for himself and make a lot of money," he said, "to somebody who wanted to share my skills with other people. When Ann offered me this job, it was something that really called out to my heart, but I was thinking, wow, this is going to be a lot of work." We walked along the edge of the garden, among the perennials donated by Fearrington Village now thriving in the sun. On another bank were three small plots tended by families from the neighborhood. Atwater showed me some tiny cherry tomato plants struggling to grow from seeds germinated organically in the greenhouse. Their size worried him.
"I'm the biggest worry-wart in the organization," said Atwater. "You're trying to garden, that's a war in itself. You're trying to sustain a nonprofit organization, that's a separate kind of war. You're trying to make an environment where people really feel like they can make a transition--all those things mesh together. The guys have the opportunity to put out the seeds and see them germinate. Hopefully it reinforces their recovery." Organic growing and fighting homelessness go well together in Atwater's mind, especially since substance abuse is often one of the problems involved in homelessness. "Part of the reason we do things organically is that it means the garden is chemical-free. "
Ann Kenan says the organization has come a long way since its inception in 1993. Kenan was hired by Board President Brenda Brodie, who was interested in projects that addressed gardening as a form of art, but was not familiar with the urban greening movement flourishing around the country. Kenan, whose university work was in urban studies, told Brodie about the work of Urban Habitats, Earth Island Institute and Urban Commons in Philadelphia. In the process the two women discovered a common concern: the revitalization of the degraded neighborhoods of Durham. Kenan was also knowledgeable about the field of horticultural therapy and had worked in garden projects for the homeless and for people recovering from head injuries. The Seeds idea began to come together and Kenan started looking for land, resulting in the links with Southern States and Phoenix House.
More and more people began to respond to the project, offering hope and help and supplies. "Everybody's been so generous in the plant world," she said, "nurseries, farmers with extra seedlings."
Perhaps the most unexpected bit of help came from Will Hooker, a teacher in landscape design at NC State whose class Kenan joined. "Will Hooker was excited to find a person in his class asking questions about designing a real live public space," she said. Hooker and the class designed a cornucopia for the garden, which by summer's end will be full of living plants waiting to be harvested and sold. The sculpture is lying on its side, tall enough for an adult to enter, but small enough at its end for only a child to exit.
Children were on hand to test the structure at the spring celebration last month, along with the families who garden there, people from Phoenix house, NC State students, community advisors and more. Many who had contributed to the garden were there to witness the first flowering. Many who had watched Gilbert Street slowly decaying watched it come quickly back to life. The students raised the tall bamboo weathervane and Will Atwater cautiously uncovered his kale.
***
Harvey Harman has farmed in Bear Creek for four years. He lives with his wife Nancy and three young sons in a small farmhouse enfolded in long, serpentine, fertile beds of vegetables and flowers. Harman has proved two Chatham County acres can feed 40 families, April to November, for $430 each. That's what it costs to be a part of Walk Softly, Harman's version of the "community-supported agriculture" plan that is being practiced all over the country whereby small farmers sell direct to consumer-members. Weekly, full-share members in Walk Softly get about eight pounds of 47 different organically grown vegetables and ten herbs, plus fruits and berries, all delivered to drop-off points in Chapel Hill and Pittsboro. Members participate in distribution and sometimes work on the farm
I have been hearing about Harvey Harman's farm ever since I moved here two years ago. I have always had a garden, even when I had to hack it out of the asphalt in downtown L.A., and when I moved to North Carolina I set about getting hold of some of its fertile soil and learning what would grow in it. In answer to almost every question I asked about organic farming, I heard, "You should go see Harvey."
You should. It's a biodynamic paradise.
When I arrived I saw Harman and two of his apprentices, Michael Semonsky and Walt Tysinger, boring holes in oak logs and packing shiitake mushroom spores into them, then stacking them in the woods where mushrooms were already proliferating in a batch of logs.
Semonsky is one of three apprentices living at the farm, receiving room and board, a $70 monthly stipend, and all the organic farming lessons he can absorb. Semonsky heard about Harman's apprenticeship program while walking the Appalachian Trail, "trying to figure out a moral way to live my life, wanting to live close to the earth."
He walked me around the four ponds, explaining how the they catch nutritious runoff from the beds, which is then recycled as irrigation for newly planted seedlings. Pointing out the mosquito fish, he said they come to the ponds on the legs of blue herons and help the frogs make short work of the stinging insects breeding there.
Semonsky toured me past the beehives and the outdoor shower, then showed me the composting toilet the nine farm residents use. Next I was handed over to Walt and Debbie Tysinger and their 2-year-old, Emily, for a conversation in their teepee. The Tysingers arrived in March from Washington State looking for farming experience. The teepee, 20 feet in diameter, holds their beds and a comforting variety of family totems arranged against the canvas wall.
"Harvey and Nancy are good parents and great friends," Debbie said. "I'm impressed with how they include the children on the farm and have family meetings. We share all our meals together, three times a day. It's a good time to get together and see how everybody's feeling." When Emily told me she feeds the chickens, I was led to the coop. In addition to the large pen, about a dozen chickens are kept in a chicken tractor, a pen on wheels. "These birds eat 1,000 insects a month," said Harman, joining us. "They cut the grass in one spot and we move them to another. Chicken manure combined with urine is very high in nitrogen, which is great for the soil."
One of Harman's sons emerged from the house with an order for fresh vegetables for lunch and we began to move among the beds, picking lettuce and arugula and radishes. Between the high curved beds run small streams of water where duckweed and water hyacinths are grown for mulch and compost. We passed the goat pen, where a nanny was fussing over two brand new kids, her udder full of milk for her babies and the human family. We skirted a herd of sheep contained by a movable, electrified fence; they were eating their way along the edge of a vegetable bed, creating a garden path and leaving behind nutritious manure as they went. Later, like the chickens, they would provide meat for the family table: an integrated, complementary system.
A large bed of tall greens nearby turned out to be larkspur. Harman told me he gets 40 cents a stem from a local florist who will take all he can grow. "If you're just interested in money, you'd make more growing flowers," he said. "Vegetables are low-end. We can make $1,000 a year per bed in flowers, but money's not the reason we do what we do." Last year the farm was so successful that he found himself in his truck every day delivering orders, but trucking is also not what Harman wants to do, so he cut back. Now he sells to only Wellspring Grocery and Noah's Food Co-op in Raleigh, at the Sanford Farmer's Market, and to the members of Walk Softly.
Harman becomes expansive when talking about the benefits of membership in Walk Softly. Members won't save any money on groceries, he says, but the payoff is huge. They're eating a much wider variety of produce than they can get in a store and it's high in vitamins and minerals. The produce is pesticide-free, delicious, local and fresh, delivered within 24 hours of picking. "Average store produce has traveled 1500 miles to get there and is a week old," Harman said. " In that time broccoli, for instance, has already lost over 40 percent of its nutritional value."
Just as important, he says, is what community-supported agriculture does for the local economy and community. Buying local organic produce encourages farmers to continue farming, to stay small and care for their land well. Most important of all, buying locally helps stop world hunger by removing support from the current food structure. That system forces small farmers everywhere off their land, and entices developing countries to grow cheap food on large plantations for export to wealthy countries, while peasant farmers must buy back staple crops at high prices.
Much of Harman's philosophy is drawn from his work with subsistence farmers in Africa from 1985 to 1991. The Harmans lived among the Xhosa tribe in a round mud hut with a smeared cow-dung floor, and two of their three sons were born there. Not only did they all learn to speak in the Xhosa language (the one with the "click"), they learned some important things about sustainable agriculture and about the world and brought them home to Carolina.
For further information about getting involved with Seeds, call 919/683-1197. To find out about joining Walk Softly, contact steering committee members Faye Duncan, 108 W. Poplar Ave, Carrboro 27514, or Randy Dodd, 919/687-4143
Copyright 1995, Linda Frye Burnham — All Rights Reserved
This essay may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of the author."Cornucopia" first appeared in The Independent Weekly of North Carolina, May 17, 1995
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