What I Learned This Year

By Diana Sette

To say simply what I’ve learned in the garden this year can be done so in three sentences:

1. Explore what is possible.

2. Never stop engaging with and building community, this is the greatest resource.

3. Know your personal limits, respect them, and ask for help when you need it.

When We Started

In many ways I relearn and practice these lessons every year in the garden- sometimes I am left with greater feelings of satisfaction than others, yet always grateful for the garden lessons.

I am constantly overdoing it, ambitious and ever exploring.  This quickly ties in my third lesson- know your limits.  This season I’ve practiced this in taking a new position as I work with Possibilitarian Garden, our community-based garden on E 117^th St off of Buckeye Rd.  I see all the work that there is to do to improve the soil, to connect with neighbors, listen to the land, and woo the beneficial pollinators.  Yet I am only one person, and I have a family and a full-time job, and numerous other organizations I play significant roles in- and I have to check myself constantly to make sure I am gardening within my limits.

That doesn’t mean that I am not always remaining open to what is possible, because I am.  Because my vision has only grown clearer of the regenerative community space that a garden can play.  The plants and the people that gather around and amongst them in community is what continues to show and clarify this vision for me.  And just like my baby seedlings, that vibrant vision for community I hold only grows in mind, and this garden has reminded me again this year to continue to nurture it because the pay off is long-term.  Because it is a regenerative cycle.  And because a community garden will only build upon its potential fertility for gardens and community, if I nurture both community and gardens.

Finally, it is the community that makes a community garden, and this is what I am continuing to learn here.  Margaret Wheatly sums up a key lesson that resonated with me this season, “Our communities must support our individual freedom as a means to community health and resiliency.  And individuals must acknowledge their neighbors and make choices based on the desire to be in relationship with them as a means to their own health and resiliency.”

So whatever I planted in my community garden this year, it has been in community and based on the desire to be in relationship with community.  The importance of this is what I learned the most this year.

*If you are interested in getting involved with Possibilitarian Garden, we are having a Harvest Party and Work Day on Sunday, September 27 from 1-6pm, and will be a fun event of planting pollinator friendly plants, sheetmulching, grilling, spoken word, sweating and getting dirty with new friends!

Contact me at Diana_sette@yahoo.com for more info.

 The garden this autumn

A Hike to Holden Arboretum’s Carver’s Pond

Elsa Johnson

When the Cleveland Museum of Natural History holds its annual symposium there are GREAT  opportunities to go on hikes that visit some of northeast Ohio’s very special places.  The hike to Carver’s Pond is one of these.  I’ve been on this hike several times, and it is always rewarding. The pond is a Holden Arboretum holding, but lies outside the arboretum proper and can be visited only with special permission and a guide (ours was led by Holden’s own Roger Gettig). 

So the first part of our trip involved first getting to the place where the hike began, near an enclosure where Holden is testing the pest or pathogen resistance of various trees and shrubs.  Then one wanders through a large unmown field (full of bee-full goldenrod this time of year) where Holden has planted more trees to observe over time (White Pine, Dawn Redwood). Then you tromp a long way through an oak/beech forest,  overlooking a creek that is in some places a hundred feet below…

And then you are there.

What makes Carver’s Pond fascinating is that it lies in a submerged valley that itself lies thirty feet above the creek below.  The natural outlet at the west end of the pond has been blocked by a beaver dam, creating a water impoundment of about 5 acres, studded with water lilies and dead trees (in which heron used to nest but no longer do) . There is no one around except some ducks and herons. It is very, very quiet. 

The way out is faster but steeper: no sloth possible. My butt muscles are tired. It was a good hike. 

The Peripatetic Gardener Visits a Hospital by Catherine Feldman

In San Francisco this month the Peripatetic Gardener sat through three seemingly endless visits to one emergency room. Great gratitude was due to the medical staff who so graciously and effectively attended the Gardener’s elderly parents.

Dear Demeter, though, how different a hospital was from a garden! “Where is the greenery to provide fresh oxygen to the stuffy rooms?” asked the Gardener. She longed for sunshine to help dispel the known and unknown diseases that contaminated the air and surfaces. While it made sense to her that a 92-year-old man would have a severe vitamin D deficiency, it was an eye opener to learn that so do many of the young interns and residents.  Much has been said about the need to improve the food in hospitals; she called now for a discussion of how to make the environment in hospitals more comfortable and healthful for patients, visitors and staff: that is, more like a garden.

One Several Important Thing(s) I Learned This Year

The official Ohio state flower is the carnation (a Mediterannean native!) but the official Ohio state wildflower is our native trillium.  This past spring I visited Garden in the Woods and the horticulturist mentioned that white trillium petals turned pink after the flower has been pollinated.   (I didn’t know that!)  Since this is the first year I’ve had trillium in my garden it was the perfect opportunity to observe this beautiful spring ephemeral daily.  These photos track the buds through flowering and setting seed.  Observing the seed case I thought there would be one big seed inside.  I was surprised when it burst open and scattered a whole bunch of shiny brown seeds on the ground. (I didn’t know that!)  I learned it takes up to seven years for trillium rhizomes to produce a flowering plant.  (I didn’t know that!)  If you want to learn more about trillium seed development here is a fascinating article and another about propagation.  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a plant nursery in NE Ohio that propagated our native woodland ephemerals so everyone could enjoy them in their garden?

More photos are here.

GARDENOPOLIS Cleveland thanks Ken Weiss who photographed some of the wildlife at our Launch Party on August 30th.

View below some party animals – genus, “gardener”

Now that the aphids have been fruitful and multiplied all over my butterfly garden (they seem to be feasting on the diet of soap and alcohol that I have been blasting them with,) I think I’m going to have to fork out for the Green Lace Wings. The price isn’t much, but the shipping is, so I decided  to try first the soap and alcohol recipe that I found on the internet. It definitively did not work. Who else eats aphids? Ladybugs? Is anyone else having this problem? Any good, garden-healthy hacks? Please send them to our Comments section. 

 The Green Hope