On Saturday, I again watered the neighbor bed, the food
pantry plots, the newly seeded areas, a 
flower pot, and my plot. I fertilized
the seedlings (which were sprouting from being planted last Saturday). I
also weeded all of the above (except the middle food pantry plot) and reorganized the shed. I also groused about how few of the gardeners
seem to be harvesting their produce or weeding.
Neal hasn’t weeded the strawberry patch yet, even though it’s been his
weekly chore for August and September.
Sigh. Mari has let tomatoes and zucchini rot in her plot. Double sigh.
Rayna’s plot is covered in bind weed.
However, Amy rode over on her bike, weeded her plot and a little of the
center flower bed and blueberry bushes and then harvested tomatoes peppers and
bush beans from the middle food pantry plots before riding away with her hubby. I reloaded our free little library (after a
little boy stopped by and found nothing to his liking). I then
turned to our weekly food pantry harvest in the remaining food pantry plots and
harvested from my own plot. I also
pinched tomato flowers because we are nearing the end of their growing season
and picked up litter which had been dumped or blown onto our lot in the past
week. Then, it’s back to my house to
weigh our food pantry harvest, record it and head over to the food pantry
before it closes. Our pole beans seem to
be on their last legs, but I found some more volunteer napa cabbage and bok
choy in my plot (which was a delight).
On Friday, Seth from the City Land Bank, sent around an
email congratulating the winners from this year’s Growing to Green awards
celebration. One of the big winners was
our next door neighbor, Kimball Farms, in only their second growing season,
with twelve small children in its summer day program. (Yea Melinda and Norman). I'm so jealous of Melinda that she was able to manage a community garden while spending most of the summer in Ireland and the Pacific west coast. I can't remember the last time I took any summer vacations; not since I started the SACG. We’ve been very fortunate to not have any
produce thefts this year and I attribute this at least partially to the fact
that our thieves are helping themselves to the Kimball Farms garden next door.
I asked Norman and Melinda if I should be shooing away thieves or encouraging
folks to help themselves.
Anyway, at the very bottom of this long email from Seth, he
slips in the following:
Collection of garden data
a.
We
asking for gardens to voluntarily report the amount of produce grown in terms
of pounds of each produce grown and/or money generated. Community events at the
garden sites may also be documented.
b.
Next
year, we will likely be amending the garden license agreements to make this a
requirement of all community gardens to report the benefits at the end of each
growing season.
c.
Our
goal is to begin recording this data in an effort to show City leaders the
impact our community gardens are making on their communities. As some of you
may know, the City and County are working on a food plan. As a result, we want
to be in a position to most benefit from the results of the planning study. Politicians
like numbers showing positive cause and effects.
I freaked out. It already
takes me about 45 minutes each week to keep track of this information for just
the food pantry donations. It’s so time
consuming that this year I decided to only make such donations once each week
(instead of twice). I grow so many
different things in my own plot that I couldn’t possibly do this in any efficient
way. There is no way any of my gardeners
would or could do this. Most people can’t
even count the calories in their daily meals for more than a day or two at a
time because it is so time consuming (even with online calorie counters like
myfitnesspal.com), but the City expects us to stop whatever we are doing, sort
our daily/weekly harvest, and record each week how much of each produce we get
and then add it all up at the end of the season and report it to them. We don’t
even keep track of the food we give away to beggers or through our neighbor
plot. How can we keep track of the
berries or cherries that the neighborhood kids eat when we are not there? Should
we eliminate our neighbor plots and put a fence around our fruit trees and
berries? Should we tell the kids: stop eating those until we weigh them? It’s ridiculous.
When I told Amy about this yesterday, she asked whether the
City intended to give us a large scale to keep in our shed so that we could do
this. Will they replace it when it gets
stolen (like all of our seeds, gloves and most of our tools were this year)? I have a single, unemployed mother who
travels to and from the Garden by bus or hitching. I seriously doubt that she even owns a scale. How is she supposed to do this? Neal stops by almost daily in the summer and
then heads over to Wings Restaurant so that Ken can cook him dinner (or make
him a salad) with what he harvests. Do
you really think he wants to spend time telling Ken to weigh and record it
first? When I leave the Garden in the
summer, I’m hot and grouchy. I do not want
ONE MORE SINGLE THING TO DO.
Casual and non-gardeners cannot imagine how oppressively time consuming this request is. No one does this in their real life. One gardener in Maine decided to do it in 2009 out of curiosity and blogged about it. You simply don't see casual or hobby gardeners -- like us at the SACG -- doing this. Don't get me wrong. It's fascinating and useful information. However, the value of the information is far exceeded by the amount of work involved. There are easier ways to estimate the information than in requiring overworked and overwhelmed community gardeners to do more work than they already are. For instance, Bill could measure and weigh everything in his home garden in his own free time and we could use that as the basis to estimate what the rest of us are growing.
All of our gardeners come at different times during the
week, depending on their work schedules, etc.
I haven’t seen Lea since April and have only seen Sabrina once (at a
pizza party) since she had a new baby in June. I only met Kaci twice when she performed half
of her work equity in May and I don’t think she ever harvested anything anyway. Different gardeners grow different things and have different success rates. There’s
no realistic way for me to police or monitor any of the individual harvests by
gardeners. It's not even possible to guess based on my food pantry harvests since individual gardeners occasionally donate to it and I end up taking over at least one plot mid-season after it has been abandoned.
To give you just one example of how unbelievably unrealistic this request is, many of my gardeners won't even write down the new combinations for our shed. Before all of our break-ins this year, I used to have one combination that opened our gates and our shed. But with our new security system (which I am not going to describe), the gardeners now need to remember three combinations to get into the Garden and into the shed. Even though most of them have college degrees, this has been too much work for them. Instead, I have received complaints about how they can no longer weed or water their plots because it is too difficult to get into the shed. (Time consuming, yes, I agree. Significantly more difficult? Not really if you would simply go to the trouble of writing down the information or putting it into your phone). But they have objected to three combinations despite the obvious need for a stronger security system to protect our assets.
Bill Dawson has been pushing this agenda for years of cataloging the weight and type of produce grown at community gardens. Upper Arlington Lutheran Church does this
with their Garden (where 100% of their produce is donated to their various
ministries). It’s one thing when you
grow items in bulk and large quantities and conduct large harvests of just a
few items each week. However, most plot
gardeners – particularly at the SACG – grow a wide variety of items in a small
space. Just enough for ourselves. This week, for instance, I harvested four
kinds of peppers, 10 kinds of tomatoes, tomatillos, four kinds of beans, broccoli,
three kinds of kale, and basil. Some
weeks, there are also peas, cabbage and lettuces. You can see from the pictures how my weekly
harvest compares to our weekly food pantry harvest.
Then there’s me. I’m
already overwhelmed and burned out.
There is no joy in this anymore.
I have to deal with crazy people, unreasonable people, touchy people,
emotionally needy children, thieves, vandalism, droughts, litter, monsoons,
weeds, bugs, poison ivy, heat, and sun burn, etc. I have no time for anything else in my
life. I’ve become dull and everyone I
know rolls their eyes when it comes to me and the Garden. My parents desperately want me to quit. I
started the Garden in 2009 so that I could have a plot of my own near my house. I don’t mind that it’s gotten a little out of
hand, although I resent that I have a bunch of freeloading gardeners who are
only too happy to let me do most of the work.
If everyone were like Amy, Sabrina, Susan and Frank this might actually
be fun, but it stopped being fun for me quite a while ago. The only reason I haven’t quit is because I
feel a sense of responsibility for the Garden and recognize that it benefits a
neglected neighborhood.
I called Seth immediately to protest this ridiculous amount
of work. He said that it had been
discussed at the Franklin Park Conservatory yesterday and that it had been Bill
Dawson’s idea. They are trying to think
of ways to convince the City Council to allocate more funds to community
gardens. However, dearies, we need more
help, not more work. I won’t sign any
lease or license that requires me or any of my gardeners to do this. No way.
No how. It’s not like the City
is going to pay us to gather and record this information. It’s as though the City fails to recognize
how much work we already do to improve these awful Land Bank lots and to improve the
neighborhoods where the community gardens are located (which, by and large, are
not in middle class or upper income neighborhoods since all of their lots are
filled with single-family houses, parks and businesses). We apparently are not getting any credit for
the extraordinary amount of work and sweat equity we already invest in the
lots. They think that they are doing us
a favor by making additional work a condition of volunteering in these
gardens.
I’m not saying that they are bad people. On the contrary, they have each made lovely contributions to the SACG over the years. But they are seriously misguided on this issue. If they just want a simple report of our
activities, that would be fine. As most
of you know, I provide that to our donors and supporters anyway – including to
the City. If they just wanted to know
how much money we raise by selling produce, that’s easy enough to report (i.e.,
$2.00). I am not, however, going to increase my
already ridiculous work load by gathering information about the weight of the
produce grown by our plot gardeners or myself individually. If that means the end of the SACG, then it’s
on them. I’m already looking forward to
starting a new adventure in my life that has absolutely nothing to do with
dirty fingernails, soiled clothing or wearing a beat up old gardening hat. I’m looking forward to having more time to
clean my house, landscape my own yard and not being so tired on Monday because
I work even harder on weekends than I do on weekdays.
Now, I know that there are some nonprofit leaders out there
thinking that they have to gather ridiculous information as part of their
grants and I’m just a whiny crybaby. Let
me remind you that you get paid to do this.
You take your salary and you buy food, shelter, clothing and
entertainment for yourself and your family.
We do not get paid. On the
contrary, not only do we pay to be there, we invest hours and hours and hours
of our limited free time to improve the lots
and the surrounding neighborhood. We
already do more than enough to justify whatever support we get from the City
and keep the few pounds of produce we grow for ourselves without attaching more
strings to it. Seth acknowledges this
and conceded that it had been part of their discussion. However, apparently they don’t care that we
don’t have enough time as it is to do everything that needs to be done
(like mow lawns, weed, etc.) , they want us to do even more.
Seth asked if we couldn’t count the number of tomatoes we
harvest. You can tell that he has never
grown his own food. Neal grows thousands
of tiny tomatoes. I grow a variety of
different tomatoes, romas, beefstake, Brandywines, san marzanos, Ohio Belgians,
Rutgers, Sioux, Cherokee purple,
cherries, etc. They all weigh something
different. There has been 100 pounds different in weights of our food pantry tomato donations over the years. Peppers are also different sizes
and weights and, at the end of the day, weigh far less than their appearance
because they are essentially hollow.
So, if you care about the future of community gardens in the
City of Columbus, you should immediately email Seth ( at SWHBrehm@columbus.gov) and Bill at (bdawson@fpconservatory.org) and
Barb (at BJSeckler@Columbus.gov) and tell them that you oppose creating more
work for community gardens and requiring us to weigh every bit of produce that
we grow (whether in total or by category) as a condition of working hard in
adverse conditions in our free time to improve neglected City neighborhoods. After my discussion with Seth, he emailed all
of the land bank community gardens again:
I would like
to throw out there that if you have comments and concerns about the ability to
measure the amount of produce grown, i.e. weighing, money generated, etc.,
please let me know. While I said it is likely we would add language to our
license agreement, if I find this will unfairly burden and hinder the program,
we will consider other alternatives. I want to be able to have a discussion
with other City staff based off of feedback I have received.
I have
provided Seth with a copy of my food pantry harvest records (with the names of
individual donor gardeners redacted) so that he can see the minutia involved in
gathering and recording this information.
It has to be done with every harvest because no one can realistically
keep track of how much of each produce they grow over the season unless you
keep detailed records each and every time you pick food. I also explained that most of the gardeners
will have no clue how ridiculously time consuming it is to do this until they’ve
tried and very few of them have tried. I’m even willing to concede that it may not
be a big deal for small communal gardens, if they have access to a scale,
because they grow items in bulk and disperse everything at the same time. However, when you harvest tiny amounts several times each week -- like most of us do -- it will take more time to keep track of this information than it does to harvest it.
I also want to acknowledge that the City and Conservatory have been very helpful to us over the years and I'm not one of those community garden leaders that constantly bitches about how much more they should be doing. (While Columbus may not compare well to Cleveland, we're still miles ahead of Toledo, Cincinnati and Louisville, etc.). I'm a glass half-full kinda girl most of the time. The City gave us the funds to buy our large rain tank in 2010. They are loaning us another. They refilled part of tank for us last year and may do so again next month. They bought our picnic table and have given us soil amendments. Bill and the Conservatory (and Fiona, too) have given us seeds, replaced some of our stolen tools this summer, gave us our two benches and some compost, too. We have greatly appreciated their support. However, I won't be taking anything else from the City if it means I have to take on more work as they are now suggesting. It's not a hard decision, really.
beds, the food pantry plots and my plot before harvesting a bit from my plot. I wanted to pinch the basil, but wasn’t in the mood and didn’t really have time. Giovanni came by to check on her bed and pick up a few tomatoes. She’s enjoying school and math is her favorite subject. Some new neighbors stopped by while I was filling watering cans and were exploring Amy’s plot. It was a mother and tiny little boy (who I think was stepping on Amy’s lettuce and beet seedlings while his mother was checking out her chocolate mint). I explained that that it was Amy’s plot and I was getting ready to leave. She admired the Garden and they stopped by our Free Little Library as they departed. 
and lettuce seedlings into it. Then, I thinned the romaine lettuce growing in the food pantry plot and transplanted them as well. I also watered the new seedlings growing elsewhere in the Garden and my own plot. I also harvested greens, broccoli, herbs, tomatillos and peppers for our weekly food pantry donation, pinched basil, watered my own plot and harvested from my own plot. 
