Working with Enthusiasm!

One of the most troubling aspects about America’s food system is that so many people are unaware that it is broken. When food is easily accessible at the grocery store, there’s no need for people to think any further than checking off their shopping list.

In my time with Montana FoodCorps, I’ve encountered a great many people who aren’t interested in changing the system. When they can afford to pick up what they need at the grocery store every week, it becomes awfully hard to convince them that something’s wrong.

Lame Deer is an entirely different experience. For people living paycheck to paycheck, the flaws of the system become obvious. They can’t afford what they’d like at the grocery store. What the grocery store has is neither fresh nor affordable because of the distance it travels to get here. Transversely, people can rarely afford to drive the 100 miles it takes to reach quality food. And all of these challenges are readily acknowledged by everyone who lives here.

Honor Ceremony at the Pow-Wow

 Because Lame Deer fully recognizes these challenges, my gardening project has been embraced with enthusiasm by the community. The Extension Office here has become my best friend as well as the Club’s primary sponsor for the garden. Co-workers now stop by my office to chat about caring for their tomatoes or to share sunflower seeds, kids bring me daily reports of the number of flowers on our strawberry plants, and I give tours to kids of the garden at my house and get them to try arugula. The Club welcomed me to the community with an honor ceremony at their annual PowWow, following which I was engulfed by the town's gardening population.

This week I met with the Greenhouse manager for Little Big Horn College on the neighboring Crow Reservation, to learn that we have exactly the same agenda. Her program runs a demonstration garden, offers a goldmine of gardening information within the community, and promotes the health and economic benefits that local produce offers. She is developing community surveys, finding partners, and spreading the word. She left my office with a list of plants the greenhouse will donate to the Club, and left me thrilled and impressed that this community is so ready to work to address the many challenges of food insecurity here. I hope that we can develop a partnership to increase the reach of both our gardens and raise awareness about the feasibility of growing our own produce in this region.

For the first time this week I worked in the garden with Club kids. I had them help me mix soil in pallet- beds and then each child planted a seed of their choosing in a milk carton. By the end of the hour, there were seeds everywhere, milk cartons had already been spilled and everyone was elbow deep in the damp soil making mud pies.

Though I’ve yet to establish order in the garden, the enthusiasm I’m working with makes every step far more fun since I’m working to moderate energy instead of having to relentlessly build it myself. One of the most important lessons I’m taking away from this year is that change comes from energy, but if there isn’t energy then change can’t happen no matter how much cheer leading I’m willing to take on. I feel privileged that I get to experience and learn about both sides of this challenge!

How to Build a Garden

It’s hard not to admire a brand new garden. Freshly-built raised beds, evenly-coiled hoses and neatly stacked tools are an inspiring sight to gardeners and food enthusiasts alike. How can tomatoes not thrive when planted in raised beds out of newly-hewn wood? Don’t peas always grow better on carefully-crafted trellises? Being a FoodCorps volunteer means I’ve seen and helped out in numerous gardens this year built at nearby schools, for communities and in greenhouses.  

It would be easy to get the impression that this is the only way a garden should be; fresh, pristine and organized. But although they look inspiring, these beautiful gardens are intimidating. The cost of lumber, potting soil, tools and materials adds up, and keeping a garden site looking like new can seem an insurmountable task for a new gardener. 

This is why I am especially excited about the garden that we’ve started at the Boys & Girls Club in Lame Deer. Since I’m here for only a short time, I don’t have much access to grant money. The Club has limited funds, which means we are building this garden on the cheap- and through the wonderful generosity of the local Extension Office. 

Our garden is made out of recycled (untreated) shipping pallets we found in the backyard. There is nothing fancy about them. They are heavy, rugged and full of splinters. I've spent hours pulling rusty, bent nails from their boards. They are filled with a mix of potting soil and red clay scavenged from a nearby hillside. They are lined with landscaping cloth, cut with children’s scissors and attached with my office stapler and plundered staples. No fancy tools necessary here!

We have 30 strawberry plants growing in the pallets along with some garlic, lettuce and onions. I water them with a kitchen pot because there isn’t a working spigot outside, and no one in town sells appropriate watering cans. We’re starting tomatoes and sunflowers in used milk cartons donated by the school, as well as every feasible container I found in my house. There are marigolds growing in a coffee cup and thyme emerging from the salt shaker. Starts are crowded onto my windowsill and front porch since we have no greenhouse. We’ll fertilize with my homemade Bokashi compost and what we can afford to buy at the hardware store. 

There is nothing fancy about this garden. This setup means more work, no doubt about it. My hands are still healing from the splinters acquired from working on the pallets. My back aches at the thought of carrying that watering pot out to the plants. But all of these inefficiencies make this garden even more relevant. This is not a community where people are going to buy fresh lumber for beds, or nice hoses to water with, or bags of new soil. Gardens are pieced together out of whatever materials are available. The extra labor is worth it if it saves money and gardeners can get a couple of fresh vegetables for their efforts.

The Boys & Girls Club garden isn’t just about bringing fresh food to Lame Deer’s kids. It’s about demonstrating to this community that gardening doesn’t mean colorful pottery or shiny new shovels, smooth green hoses or sharp clippers. This garden says that gardens don’t have to be an expensive or fancy affair. The strawberries will grow just as well in the pallets as if they were in beds built by carpenters. Lettuce does just fine being watered out of the pot as long as it doesn't get flooded. Our rickety pallets probably won’t last more than two years, and the Club may not always have volunteers willing and able to carry that damn bucket of water. But if all this garden does is illustrate to Lame Deer how accessible gardening can be, than it will be effort well-spent.

What's Funny...

It’s been an interesting first month in Lame Deer, and I’ve learned a lot. The most important thing I’ve been working on is my sense of humor. My mantra has become “remember, this will be funny one day,” and I’m getting much better at keeping this in mind.

So this week, here is a list of things that are funny:

1.       My home phone only works when it is less than 50 degrees outside

2.       My snuggie is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I take back anything I ever said against snuggies

3.       I’m growing thyme in a salt shaker

4.       My oven is my main source of heat at home

5.       “Delight in the Lord” is written on my bathroom mirror and I can’t get it off

6.       People “park” their horses in parking spaces and at the gas station

  7.       I started a garden at the Boys & Girls Club after being here for only three weeks

 

   8.       I’ve named my trailer ‘the Hatch’ (in reference to the TV show ‘LOST’)

   9.       The Lame Deer Hardware store is also the movie rental place

  10.   Thanks to wonderful people thinking of me back home, I have more dark chocolate and Oregon coffee in my cupboard than any other type of food

  11.   My favorite part of the weekend is listening to ‘Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’ while  doing a puzzle

12.   I am trying to figure out where to plant a hops vine at the Club

13.   My office desk is named the “time-out corner”

14.   I can play my guitar as loud as I want in the Hatch (which is way louder than I anticipated wanting to)

15.   Now that I have no access to it, I crave pop music

16.   A 200 mile round-trip drive made with joy to my favorite coffee shop in Miles City on the weekend 

17.   Upcoming TB vaccinations? 

18.   There are going to be 3 other volunteers living in the Hatch with me this summer.

19.   ‘Tub Thumping’ by Chumbawumba is my theme song (“I get knocked down/but I get up again/you’re never gonna keep me down)

20.   Time goes way faster here than in Forsyth