Giving Away Gardens

"A wise man fills bellies." — Tao Te Ching

"Idiot wind, it's a wonder we can even feed ourselves."  — Bob Dylan

A CRIP GANG member approached the woman for whom I was building a vegetable garden — an old woman on welfare, an ex-prostitute, ex-waitress, ex-chicken-butchering plant worker. He said he was tired, pimping was hard work. I kept to my hammer and shovel, hearing the woman's tubercular laugh, and repressed a moral urge to bash his brains in, instead muttering something nonsensical about individuated karma and samsara, knowing and glad that the garden will persist longer than he will.

THE MAN WHO helps me would have been a great pioneer; he hates lawns, and jobs. He is nearly fifty and has never been able to tolerate employment for longer than three months at a stretch. To him lawns and civilization are the same phenomenon, ass-backwards and fit for no good use. When he and I are working together we are a team; we get it done. We frequently use the language of work learned in Vietnam.

Work starts in March. There is limited time — spring — in which to fulfill the contracts among the Home Gardening Project, the funding sources, the city government, and the new gardeners. The purpose of the work is to foster self-reliance and improved health and well-being.

If the weather is looking like the rains will break, I order the two truckloads of two-by-eights and two-by-twos we'll need to build the gardens (125 in 1990, as many as we could afford to build), order the mushroom compost to augment the three loads of weed-free organic soil that are mixed and delivered to us each week, beg for a front-loading tractor, then spend a day cutting the lumber to size. Warm up for the next two-and-a-half months of constant build, and move on. Three ten-yard dumps a week are loaded three yards at a time into the back of our pickup, along with soil frames, trellis, tools — and a wheelbarrow tossed on top and tied down. At Ms. Wittingham's, the house looks well kept. She comes out — a cataract clouding her left eye — and says her husband of forty years used to love to do the garden, but he's now disabled with a stroke, sorry to hear that, that's why we're here. In the back, over the old garden site, she says. We shoulder the lumber back to the plot beside the garage, lay out the two-by-eight-inch frames, bang 'em up, the sound of the hammer drums the neighborhood awake. My helper starts at one end, I at the other; he builds two, I build one, strong-box fashion, the way my old carpenter friend taught me. He builds the trellis while I line out the frames square to the world and knock down lumps of weeds. I leave a three-foot path between frames so the garden can be comfortably tended, then we set the frames by nailing twelve-inch stakes at each corner. My helper does one side, I the other. Work output is divided equally, down to the erg.

We start wheeling in the soil, two wheelbarrows a turn, six to each soil frame: back left, back right, middle back, middle front, front left, front right — times three; the man who started goes second next time. Place and nail the trellis, one man strings while the other rakes the new seedbeds smooth — the zen of that garden, the rest and quiet. While I talk how-to with Ms. Wittingham, my helper cleans up, stows the tools, and plugs in a fresh chaw of Redman, maybe tunes in Paul Harvey. Talk ain't work as far as he is concerned.

I teach Ms. Wittingham block and succession planting, seed conservation, composting, watering, and fertilizing, and tell her I'll be by again in early May, when the weather warms up, to deliver starts for tomatoes (four varieties), eggplant, peppers, basil, and flowers. What's a garden without flowers? She says thank you, she's shy about the new gardening techniques; she's never availed herself of a social service before but now she's older and the money is gone. Careful for her dignity, I accept her thanks for making it so easy, one phone call. This is truly a Christian thing you're doing, she says, and I say glad you like it; I think, but don't say, that it's also Buddhist, Taoist, Pagan, Dyak. Men putting in gardens is a phenomenon 50,000 years deep.

On to the next one. Birdi Johnson has arthritis; she's been into the wine already this morning, doesn't come out of the house much. Neither does her fifteen-year-old daughter; too much danger lurks out here. We build the second garden of the morning, slipping on the mud and dog shit in the back yard. All she wants to grow is tomatoes, beans, collards, and corn, and I say great, sure, grow what you like to eat, it's your garden. If your hands are too painful to do the planting, I'll send someone by to help you. On to a burger palace that will let us wear rain gear dripping with mud while we eat. At the Burger King the children are proud of their wounds. They take delight in having a close friend who took a bullet in the neck or had the flesh of his shoulder carved off by a glamorous commando knife. Vietnam brain gauze gone crack crazy.

Then on to Roger Kerns; he's a paraplegic, an ex-athlete whose back was shattered in a drunken car crash. He's into Seva and lecturing high-school kids on the net results of cars and fun. He tries not to show bitterness at being the dupe of some universal force that took him off at the seventh vertebra. This garden is a double high — one frame on top of the other — so he can reach it from his electric wheelchair. He's supervising the placement, wants the overhanging maple branches pruned, the yard debris cleared away; we do what he wants, a little extra work because he can't and we can and we're here. I do the training talk, he says now he can further advance into vegetarian living, namaste.

And on again to Thelma Cason's, she's eighty-eight, still going strong, has done for herself all her life. I'm lucky to know her and her example, but the kids from the crack house down the block busted through her door, knocked her down, broke her hip, stole her thirteen-inch TV, black-and-white to boot, her food stamps. She heard I was a "good man," and that is what I'm trying to be. At least the little punks can't steal the garden. I'll drop by later this summer to see how you're keeping, and I'll call Senior Services for you, have them come and fix that back door like they should have last winter; your life and my life is our life, even this brief meeting, but you get to keep the garden, yes it is yours, a gift. A gift should be well made and leave nothing wanting. Art.

Those last two went fast, on the flat ground, time for one more if you've got the oomph, sure, why not, long way to go and a short time to get there. Let's do Kris S., three kids, three fathers, no men around now, Aid to Dependent Children and food stamps, run out of her last two houses by crank monsters. She wants to teach her children vegetable gardening to insure that they will never starve. We build it, bang it up square to the world, put it in the sunny spot next to the kitchen door. She wants to be employed as a part-time planter, and I say here's Birdi Johnson's address.

The day is done, we'll do it again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, all week the same people, the same stories, until two and a half months pass in a kind of hazy dream exertion that manifests 125 new gardens, renewed lives. On the way back to the operations site where the soil, tractor, and lumber are stored, a BMW misses a stop sign and nearly crunches the truck, our most essential tool; the brothers drinking wine and waiting for customers down on the corner of crack alley stare at us, big dumb white devils.

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