Now You Tell Me

As faithful readers know, we grow a lot of mint of various kinds at the Stoddart Avenue Community Garden.    It is pretty, and hardy, and deters mice and insects.  I pretty much use it as a ground cover in my plot.  However, as most gardeners know, it is very invasive and can take over your garden.   It takes a couple of years (but only a couple of years) to become so well established that you have to dig it out with a shovel.  It has taken over much of our front flower bed and invaded the strawberry patch (so Amy had to dig up a lot of it this Spring).      Within the last couple of weeks, I have begun pulling it out of my non-squash rows because it has gotten very tall and I don’t want it to compete for sunlight and water with my tomatoes and peppers and kale.   However, last week when she dropped off 3 community service volunteers during our Raspberry Festival, Leigh Ann (from the Miracle Garden in Linden) asked me for some mint for an interesting project that their Community Garden is pursuing to help sex trafficking victims  and Somali immigrants develop a form of income by growing, making and selling herbal teas.

As Leigh Ann explains it, their goal is to create an Urban Farming Economic Development Plan (which they have been working toward since the garden began in 2014) where they can have a women’s empowerment program for the women who have been trafficked and prostituted or victims of domestic violence as well as the Somalian women who have been culturally devalued.  They also hope to create an urban 4H and FFA program for kids that the women can help run, and this summer they will be launching a farmer’s market at their Westerville Rd location complete with an EBT machine, which they also hope to eventually have the women and the youth help run in order for them to learn marketable job skills.  They also have mentored the community garden at Capital Park, which is across the street from their Fern Ave garden since 2015.

They are also attempting to work with the Columbus Out of Darkness Program to offer the tea-making program to some of their beneficiaries.   Out of Darkness (which has taken over Hazel’s House of Hope near Parson’s Avenue) has offered its garage as a place to dry out the mint.  The Olive Branch Restaurant on Gender Road has offered to sell the teas at its café.

So, last week, our volunteers dug up lot of chocolate mint from the co-op plot and some lemon balm (which I am told also makes an excellent tea) from a food pantry plot and we put it in leftover hanging baskets which Straders Garden Centers had donated to GCGC this month.  However, Leigh Ann was going for simplicity and put it all into a giant trash bag. She seemed disappointed to have so much chocolate mint and no spearmint.    Then, on Tuesday, her interns and volunteers replanted the pruned stems and hung the rest to dry to make tea.  She is very excited and re-thought her prior reservations about chocolate mint and lemon balm.  They actually took on another Land Bank lot just for this project (instead of just a few raised beds as they had initially envisioned).   She now has a lot of space to fill.  Yesterday, I filled another bag for her with spearmint from my plot (which I had to dig out with a shovel), as well as more chocolate mint (which pulls up rather easily).   I told her that I could fill another such bag next Saturday if she wants (just from the mint in my plot).  I have a LOT of mint.

So, I’m happy to see our mint go to a good cause.  We could have given them so much more a couple of months (or even weeks) ago . . . . if we had only known.