Today's Adventures
Nov. 17th, 2024 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThe weather was clement enough to revisit the Charleston Food Forest for gathering purposes. I packed a plastic grocery bag to carry things, various sizes of ziplock baggies, paper labels to drop in the baggies, a list of planned gathering targets, and a trowel. I should've brought a heavier bag to hold everything, because the plastic one blew around if the breeze picked up. But I managed.
When we arrived, I noticed another garden on the far side of the parking lot. This was labeled a community garden, but is a genuine community garden rather than an expanse of rentable beds. The sign invited people to pick things and indicated that it was used for educational purposes. There were several large beds, a greenhouse, and a lot of additional garden just sprawled around. I suspect the beds are more for vegetable and the rest for pollinators. In several beds, I saw a lot of what might be goldenberries, but I wasn't sure. In the sprawling part, I found a considerable amount of blanketflowers and milkweeds, so I harvested seeds from these in addition to my planned targets. \o/ I am so grateful that my area has a real, useful, welcoming, extremely bohemian community garden. <3
Next I went gathering in the food forest. I collected asparagus seeds, a huge amount of zinnia seeds, and some more garlic chives seeds. I dug up several Egyptian walking onion roots and a clump of perennial leek roots. I dug up a number of crosne aka knotroot tubers, as the ground there was not greatly disturbed. People had been digging heavily in the groundnut roots, so I took fewer of those. Really I'm just interested in starting my own patches of these, but I do want the opportunity to try them in different locations and hopefully have several different plants instead of clones from just one. I can always try harvesting more later. It was a very successful gathering trip and I am well pleased.
EDIT 11/18/24 -- I looked up planting instructions for the seeds.
I wish more places had this kind of community garden where you can just go in, putter around, learn gardening, put things in your mouth, and collect stuff to plant at home. It would help a lot with poverty and hunger, because some of these things are damn expensive to buy from catalogs but quite prolific once planted. I would love to be able to visit different places and forage to see the different plants and bring home new ones, without breaking the budget.
On the bright side, this is a perfect project for anyone with a decent bit of land -- a church, a school, a business, a charity, etc. You could easily start it with cheap seeds, then add more costly roots or saplings later ... and watch for late-season sales to buy expensive stuff cheaper. Ask people to donate whatever they have extra of too. Also, I suspect that some things like knotroots and groundnuts would work great for guerilla gardening. I'm sure my sunchokes would, and so would bulbils from walking onions.
After that, we got lunch at Arby's. They had quite excellent strawberry lemonade. :D Then my partner Doug suggested that we try Insomnia Cookies for dessert. They offer a variety of standard (simpler, smaller) and deluxed (larger, sometimes more elaborate) cookies along with brownies. We split a standard-size apple pie cookie. It is basically a snickerdoodle stuffed with a bit of pie filling, and is amazingly good. We have decided that standard-size cookies should be bought one for each of us instead of split. We very much plan to go back and eat more things.
Once we got home, I only had time for a tiny bit of gardening. I did manage to get some of the knotroots into two pots. The big pot is one I've had sitting on the old picnic table, which I left there to see if they'll survive the winter like that. I also put some in a smaller pot that I partially buried in the septic garden for more protection. They're supposed to be hardy to Zone 5 and this is now Zone 6, but sometimes we get brutal cold snaps. Later I'll need to figure out A) where to put the rest of the roots and B) whether any of the seeds need cold stratification (meaning plant them now) or not (meaning save them for spring).
It has been a most productive day!
Resources
I found a couple of good references if you want to try this in your locale. Be aware that almost all "community gardens" are not actually communal, they are just places where people without a yard can rent a garden bed to use individually. There is very little material about shared gardens where anyone can just walk in and pull weeds, pick fruit, gather seeds to plant at home, etc. And that's what you need to fight food scarcity for real, because a honkin' big list of rules will scare off the poor people (and is usually meant to). Are you annoyed with America? Give capitalism a good knee in the wallet by promoting free food!
The Food Bank Gardening Handbook
How to Start a Food Is Free Project
When we arrived, I noticed another garden on the far side of the parking lot. This was labeled a community garden, but is a genuine community garden rather than an expanse of rentable beds. The sign invited people to pick things and indicated that it was used for educational purposes. There were several large beds, a greenhouse, and a lot of additional garden just sprawled around. I suspect the beds are more for vegetable and the rest for pollinators. In several beds, I saw a lot of what might be goldenberries, but I wasn't sure. In the sprawling part, I found a considerable amount of blanketflowers and milkweeds, so I harvested seeds from these in addition to my planned targets. \o/ I am so grateful that my area has a real, useful, welcoming, extremely bohemian community garden. <3
Next I went gathering in the food forest. I collected asparagus seeds, a huge amount of zinnia seeds, and some more garlic chives seeds. I dug up several Egyptian walking onion roots and a clump of perennial leek roots. I dug up a number of crosne aka knotroot tubers, as the ground there was not greatly disturbed. People had been digging heavily in the groundnut roots, so I took fewer of those. Really I'm just interested in starting my own patches of these, but I do want the opportunity to try them in different locations and hopefully have several different plants instead of clones from just one. I can always try harvesting more later. It was a very successful gathering trip and I am well pleased.
EDIT 11/18/24 -- I looked up planting instructions for the seeds.
I wish more places had this kind of community garden where you can just go in, putter around, learn gardening, put things in your mouth, and collect stuff to plant at home. It would help a lot with poverty and hunger, because some of these things are damn expensive to buy from catalogs but quite prolific once planted. I would love to be able to visit different places and forage to see the different plants and bring home new ones, without breaking the budget.
On the bright side, this is a perfect project for anyone with a decent bit of land -- a church, a school, a business, a charity, etc. You could easily start it with cheap seeds, then add more costly roots or saplings later ... and watch for late-season sales to buy expensive stuff cheaper. Ask people to donate whatever they have extra of too. Also, I suspect that some things like knotroots and groundnuts would work great for guerilla gardening. I'm sure my sunchokes would, and so would bulbils from walking onions.
After that, we got lunch at Arby's. They had quite excellent strawberry lemonade. :D Then my partner Doug suggested that we try Insomnia Cookies for dessert. They offer a variety of standard (simpler, smaller) and deluxed (larger, sometimes more elaborate) cookies along with brownies. We split a standard-size apple pie cookie. It is basically a snickerdoodle stuffed with a bit of pie filling, and is amazingly good. We have decided that standard-size cookies should be bought one for each of us instead of split. We very much plan to go back and eat more things.
Once we got home, I only had time for a tiny bit of gardening. I did manage to get some of the knotroots into two pots. The big pot is one I've had sitting on the old picnic table, which I left there to see if they'll survive the winter like that. I also put some in a smaller pot that I partially buried in the septic garden for more protection. They're supposed to be hardy to Zone 5 and this is now Zone 6, but sometimes we get brutal cold snaps. Later I'll need to figure out A) where to put the rest of the roots and B) whether any of the seeds need cold stratification (meaning plant them now) or not (meaning save them for spring).
It has been a most productive day!
Resources
I found a couple of good references if you want to try this in your locale. Be aware that almost all "community gardens" are not actually communal, they are just places where people without a yard can rent a garden bed to use individually. There is very little material about shared gardens where anyone can just walk in and pull weeds, pick fruit, gather seeds to plant at home, etc. And that's what you need to fight food scarcity for real, because a honkin' big list of rules will scare off the poor people (and is usually meant to). Are you annoyed with America? Give capitalism a good knee in the wallet by promoting free food!
The Food Bank Gardening Handbook
How to Start a Food Is Free Project
