written by Elsa Kim
I learned a lot at the Unconventional Gardeners Workshop last Sunday, March 7th. One thing I learned was that we’re truly part of a trend — or a budding movement. Twelve people showed up, enough to surround a table piled with food on the patio of Hi Rise Cafe. Not one of us had gardened for more than a year.
And yet we shared a lot of knowledge between us. The Boston area is notorious for being filled with intellectual types. If we hadn’t gardened before, by God we were going to read up on it, attend workshops, meet people, and Google the shit (then compost it) out of our questions. Our conversation began with our experience (not a lot), our spaces (mostly patios, terraces, fire escapes, and other container garden-worthy areas), what we hoped to plant (mostly vegetables), and moved on from there, in a random zigzag. If you’re already bored, skip ahead to this: we’ve started a google map of local resources for Urban Homesteaders. Feel free to add to it.
Here’s everything we talked about in a few lines:
Herbs. We talked about splitting herbs, so we could share the plants we already have.
Fruit plants. Blueberries and other fruit plants sometimes need a few years to bear fruit, so it can be better to buy a plant than a tree. Raspberries apparently bear fruit the first year.
Ideas. There is a man in Somerville who creates a container garden for you, then will deliver it, ready to grow. He takes it away at the end of the growing season and composts what’s left.
Compost. Free compost is available through Cambridge Public Works. Just show up at 147 Hampshire Street, Tuesday or Thursday from 4-7:30 PM or Saturday from 9-4 PM and do your best impression of a Cambridge resident. You can take what you can carry.
Vermicomposting. Yes, with worms. Inside. It’s all the rage, and we’re going to learn more – and possibly pick up some of our own worms – at Alli’s apartment for the next meeting, tentatively labeled “The Worm Experience.” Apparently, it helps to freeze food remains before putting them in the worm box – it degrades the structure of the food, helping the worms eat it quickly. We discovered that a few of us share an uncanny interest in waste management.
Companion Planting. Certain plants can help each other grow. These include basil, parsley, and tomatoes, or the famous three sisters – beans, corn, and squash.
Tomatoes. There are two types: determinate, and indeterminate. You have to prune the indeterminate kind, as they can get kind of sprawly. Better to plant a determinate kind if you’re planting in containers.
Etc. Finally, we talked about getting donations of things like potting soil for the Urban Homesteaders’ League – or buying in bulk. We considered how cool it would be to track the output of our gardens, to see if it could measure up to the output of a small local farm. And Allie mentioned that she’s starting a project: Her husband dared her to grow her own weight in food, and so she’s going for it — and tracking it at Allisgarden.blogspot.com. The last frost date for the Boston area is May 3rd, but seeds can be started indoors well before then (according to a book I have, around March 12).
That’s it for the first meeting of the Unconventional Gardeners. As I said, all over the place — but what project isn’t, upon starting? In this month of March, I’m hunting for recyclable trash to use for starting seeds indoors, buying seeds online, reading gardening books in Harvard Bookstore with Siri, getting seed starting soil from Tags in Porter Square, and looking forward to more emails and meetings with my fellow Unconventional Gardeners.
Tags: container gardening, gardening, uhl event