Gardeners are digging for victory – again!
AMERICANS did not invent bootstrapping or big ideas from little spaces or even universal pursuit of happiness, but they flourish here.
America is an ideal, a work in progress, an opportunity to invent or reinvent yourself if you are willing to work hard and believe as hard as you work. That has never been easy, and the current economic and political climate is making it particularly difficult now.
The tools for the lofty principles that are my vision of America often persist quietly out of the public eye until reclaimed and re-configured. The Master Gardener programme is one of the tools in place to help folks live their version of the American Dream and it is a link for me, now coming back to a much-changed America, to reconnect.
Every state has a Master Gardener programme. The grand title is one of hopefulness rather than American hyperbole. The initial certificate earned through a semester of study, at least 60 hours of volunteer community work and successfully completing a written examination, is meant to be the beginning of a lifetime of learning and sharing one’s knowledge.
A newly minted Master Gardener is more like a journeyman or apprentice gardener. When times were good, the Master Gardener programme was mostly an opportunity for the middle class to take up or expand gardening as a hobby. Some Master Gardeners continued their public service with civic projects like vest pocket public parks or even growing an extra row of veg for a local food pantry, but Master Gardeners and their parent organisation, the university extension service, were more likely used by middle-class, ex-urbanites to enhance their quality of life rather than to change people’s lives.
Now, graduates of the University of Illinois county extension programme are bringing their Master Gardener expertise to the Peterson Garden Project, which, according to its website, is a volunteer-run, charity committed to teaching people to grow their own food with "community vegetable gardens". It believes in doing so that they build stronger communities (http://www.petersongarden.org/frmHome.aspx).
For those old enough to remember Victory Gardens, the similarity is apparent, but many of those in the garden are young and for them this may be a new idea. New or old, a good idea is a good idea, and growing your own food has always been a good idea.
Stars, one of seven community garden projects, takes its name from the motel that used to be on this site. Xan Nelson, Master Gardener and square-foot gardening instructor, is showing a group of young people how to lay out the one-foot-by-one-foot grids within the raised bed each volunteer reserves for themselves.
Having completed that, she moves to another area to demonstrate a particular kind of companion planting that Native Americans called "three sisters".
Corn plants are placed on the perimeter of a small hillock. Vining beans are planted on either side of each corn plant, and three squash seeds are planted in the centre of the hillock. The corn plants provide support for the beans and some shade for a sun that can be too fierce, the beans help fix nitrogen for the corn, and the squash grow along the ground to help suppress weeds and hold on to precious moisture. A short demonstration of "three sisters" offers a lesson in history, botany, and interdependence.
I like to think also that it is a much-needed antidote for the kind of helplessness that often comes in the face of seemingly overwhelming issues as well as providing food to supplement family incomes in hard times.
In addition to individual member beds, five per cent of the garden is set aside for the Grow2Give programme, growing food for "a local food pantry or nutrition program of the garden’s choosing. For 2012, we anticipate donating a ton of food (literally!) to Chicago food programs."
I emphasised the individual garden community’s role in selecting where the Grow2Give food is donated because this seems an essential part of each garden community replicating some of America’s best ideas: first, that no matter how little you think you have, you must contribute to those with even less than you have, and, second, that you have some choice and some control over the shape of your community and your community’s assets.
According to the Peterson Garden project website, 90 per cent of those who dug Victory Gardens in World War Two had no previous gardening experience. It is convinced, and, having seen the project in action even briefly myself, I believe it can re-create that "we can do it" climate and reach a new generation of gardeners and community supporters and, in so doing, add another chapter to the American ideal.