The Sustainable Development Garden

Life might be characterized by hopping on different bandwagons, or caravans, as you realize that whole groups are in pursuit of something similar as you.  Once, alone and before my familial life began, I doted continually on Kerouac's Dharma Bums and On the Road.  But that romantic lifestyle did not take root.  I travelled by freight train to a few places, but the people I asked to share in the adventure either were too crazy to begin with, and chose wisely to begin settling down, or were made somewhat crazy by joining me.  All is disillusionment, and a constant thinning of the veil that shrouds our vision.  It was, I believe, a necessary phase, but everything I learned could easily fit on one page.

Now I find myself needing to write.  I have chosen to convey stories in this venue in light of the literature I have recently been drawn to, the places and people I have seen by travelling by bike, and putative mis-adventures of owning a bus which runs on veggie oil.  Nevertheless, these are a few of my caravans, and they fuel a particular perspective.



CSU Sustainable Development Garden



Two or three times a week I ride across campus to the CSU garden, powered by student and community volunteers.  It is a form of therapy to weed, which is my main focus. Others focus on the harvest, which supplies organic herbs and veggies once a week via their market stand.  It has been a year since I devoted such time to this place.  I have recently rekindled my relationship with this space.

As I write, situated on freshly mulched earth beneath a rusty pergola, the hops just beginning to show their golden hues, flea beeltes come onto my arm and mingle.  A lady bug larvae drops from somewhere right onto the page.  There is an ecosystem here.  There is a small agricultural ecosystem which has been sustained here for several seasons.  Without chemical inputs, without pesticides, students and community volunteers have nurtured vegetables, herbs, and fruit, sustainably, and in so doing contributed to the sustenance of all who came by the vegetable stand.  Many have gone on to run their own small farms, or contribute by ritual of planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting, all timeless.  Many stand ready to contribute in some way to the expansion of permaculture, stand on the precipice of starting perhaps a whole new community garden, or, just as important, revitalizing their back or front yards as a showcase of what is possible with our creativity, what we can nurture in terms of our edible landscape.

I have come here, by bike, sometimes walking, but not often enough.  With a friend I lazed about the perennial grass and ornamental garden recently, just adjacent to the vegetable garden, and there was a fox, undaunted.  It must have believed it had just as much right to be there as us.  It sat coiled, licking it's hindquarters, and regarded us cooly.  Later in the week, I sat at the koi pond, and while distracted by which fish had the most interesting markings, I failed to notice a small mouse sitting on it's haunches about ten feet away.  It rotated a small cherry around like that Mr. Peeples on SNL, eating most of it, small bits of cherry falling to the mulch.  It peered at me precipitously, ready to bolt at the first sign of movement on my part.  This is their landscape, edible, but it is ours, too.  Places such as these will exist as long as we have a need to grow good food, and to learn from one another how to do so, which is to say, forever. 

But this place will soon be replaced, putatively, with a new stadium for the CSU football team, with a special space for alumni, and a huge parking garage.  If this is it's fate, then I am fated to find new communal gardens to trek to, by bike or otherwise, to continue the growth that comes from gardening with friends and people soon-to-be-friends alike.  We have our backyards, and these are also places for us to learn, to feed our young and our brothers and sisters, but there is something different about these communal spaces.  This is our shared hobby, perhaps one of many.  On that subject, Aldo Leopold has said, "A good hobby may be a solitary revolt against the commonplace, or it may be the joint conspiracy of a congenial group.  That group may, on occasion, be the family.  In either event it is a rebellion, and if a hopeless one, all the better."

 

In 1991 I lived right next to the greenhouses and the Plant Environmental Research Center, of which the Sustainable Development garden is a part.  I walked or rode past it each day on may way to school and to work, a new job in the laboratory of Dr. Parviz Azari, now retired.  I was kindling for the first time a love of research, a delving into the unknown, even if just barely.  I regarded the gardens from afar, a nice place to look at, a backdrop.  But it is actually a living remnant of an old custom of nurturing sustenance out of our land.  How many places are there that we scarcely notice, on which something important is happening?  It is a living laboratory of soil fertility, entomology, and horticultural practice.  Some of us learn by doing, are propelled by the active practice of a communal activity.  Some of us come around slowly, slowly, and reach these conclusions only by action, by immersing ourselves and thereby gaining a skills-based literacy.  Ride your bike to the Sustainable Development Garden on Lake Street, bear witness to what will soon be replaced by the commonplace.  Eat of grapes and apples, help with the last harvest of squash and tomatillos, note the hops resting on their arbors and ripe for the picking, eat currant and raspberry.  Perhaps we will enable back yard gardeners and other community gardeners to take from what is seeded to propagate these fruits to new places, like tendrils spreading out over space and time.  Stage your own rebellion, and let it be productive and fruitful.