WHY

So I started to garden. Or a garden. It was not my first, but my first with vegetables, really with vegetables, since I was young and farming with my grandfather. This was a shared garden, a community garden: as much a product of place as was my grandfather's. Instead of heifers staring brown-eyed through the fence wire and a breeze of fresh mown hay from the top of Cherry Tree Hill, there were shouts from the park beyond the fence, the stray cats that liked to shit in fresh turned earth and the occasional foul ball in the beans.

That was last year. I attended a sign-up and an indoctrination. I payed my $20 and was given the basic rules of Community Gardening:

• Thou shall garden organically, without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides
• Thou shall not harm another's garden, nor shall you accidentally make yours a little bigger or theirs a little smaller
• Thou shall not steal from another's garden, nor should you barrow
• Coveting another's garden is natural. Get over it. They have corn, but you have cantaloupes
• Thou shall not use sprinklers. They are a font of wickedness, spreading foliar diseases and wasting community water
• Your plot is a temple. Keep it clean
• Share and share alike. That means the mowing as much as the finished compost
• Vegetables should not make you angry     

I was lucky, Allison, the Garden Coordinator, shined on me and gave me the former plot of a pair of dedicated gardeners. They had moved on to another city, leaving behind their crumbly, black, well-drained soil. My plot has good sun, on some of the highest ground in the garden. I was shocked at how lovely it was, when I first worked it in April and the Horsemint was in bloom. I turned over the rich earth and made four four-foot by twenty-foot raised beds, with narrow paths between. This is my main plot, but there is more, across the common pathway leading to the tool shed that fronts my plot, I have a narrow parcel that mirrors the larger one and abuts the park. It is roughly 10x20, another 200 square feet. This plot is my face to the world and is used primarily for flowers, not a small thing. I may have shared more flowers than anything else from my garden and though my lovely wife praised and enjoyed our vegetables, it was the bouquets of sunflowers and Zinnias, snapdragons and strawflower that brought her the greatest happiness.

Out of those 400 square feet I pulled a tremendous bounty, enough vegetables to be the mainstay of our diets from mid May until the end of November. During a January thaw I went to the garden and pulled 10 or 15 pounds of carrots from the ground. I know when I go there in a few weeks, there will be the succulent leaves of Mache to pick for an early salad.

There was much more gained then food. The halting conversations with the red-haired Russian lady, our talks little more than a collection of smiles and small gifts from each other's garden. She was the first to engage me and she set the tone, with a spray of fragrant dill seedlings, when the soil had barely warmed.

This is meant to be a blog though, not a novel. Let me get to the point. I was amazed at how much food came from my 400 square feet. I am determined to make a diary of this community garden year, to explain my motives, to keep an accounting, to show the quality and quantity of meals that can be pulled from the heart of a city.