Kitchen Gardeners International: January 2008 Newsletter
Read the full newsletter online here: http://www.kitchengardeners.org/newsletterjanuary08.html
Dear Kitchen Gardener,
My name is David Buchanan and I'm a KGI member as well as a member of its board. Roger has been busy building our new community site the past few weeks and asked me if I'd be willing to help out by writing this month's newsletter.
Despite my love of winter in New England, this past month I traded my snow shovel for a pickax and flew from Portland, Maine to the delta grasslands of Buenos Aires, Argentina. For the past three weeks I’ve been working with two schools on the outskirts of the city to design and build kitchen gardens funded through KGI's mini-grants program.
How much can I manage in a short time frame? I’ve focused most of my energy on a new school called La Providencia, located in a shantytown neighborhood in the town of Garin. Currently they squeeze 100 students into a modest bungalow with one barely functional bathroom. The teachers want a large kitchen garden for teaching purposes and to provide fresh vegetables for school lunches. They have a good growing site, but no other resources: no tools, hoses, watering cans, wheelbarrows, seeds, or money. Nothing but a couple of garden spades whose flat edges aren’t sharp enough to cut into the hard ground.
I threw myself into this with the understanding that nothing would likely go as planned. So it’s been no great surprise that from the day of my arrival, when the man who promised to make all my arrangements decided he had other things to do, I’ve been winging this. One day I find myself visiting farm implement dealers in a ’69 Ford with no air conditioning (not exactly a luxury when the temperature hits 103 degrees), and the next I’m sitting at a kitchen table in a colonial-era bungalow, drafting garden designs.
The people here have been wonderful. Warm, open, friendly, and concerned about my safety. Some have gone completely out of their way to help me, especially KGI member Vicky Sigwald and her husband Pablo, who’ve made this trip possible. It was especially gratifying to break ground last week with a group of a dozen students, parents, teachers and friends. With the addition of several cubic meters of compost and more pick and shovel work, we’ve turned roughly 1000 square feet of trash-filled, compacted soil into raised planting beds. Tomorrow we’ll return to plant vegetables and perennial herbs.
These gardens will continue to be worked by hand, so I wasn’t constrained by the rototiller to design square grids. The layout for one school includes a sort of cloverleaf with integrated plantings of herbs, flowers, berries, and fruit trees, and the other uses a pergola to join two oblique ovals. Everyone seems happy with the results and I think the designs will function well for access with large student groups. I’ll leave behind construction drawings and stay in touch to provide ongoing advice.
Here in Vicky and Pablo’s neighborhood of San Isidro, an elderly Italian man used to harvest fruits and berries from his garden every morning to make gelato for his shop. I believe that to be successful the local food movement needs to rediscover this kind of personal connection with the soil. Sometimes getting started can be as simple as providing tools, seeds and information. For me this trip creates a model for ongoing garden design and construction, and I intend to travel more in the future to turn neglected ground into gardens.
Thank you for supporting KGI and for helping kitchen gardens to flourish in your community. Together, we're making a difference.
David Buchanan
PS: For more details about my trip and photos, please visit my website www.eatbydesign.org and go to the “travel” section.
About our new online community: Here are some of the things you can do with our new online features: create your own profile page and blog, participate in a discussion, start up your own group (e.g. focusing on a particular issue or geographic area), share recipes and gardening tips, and meet kitchen gardeners from other part of the world. Check it out: http://my.kitchengardeners.org
Posted by KGI on January 23, 2008 6:50 PM to Kitchen Gardeners International
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Kitchen Gardeners International is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that relies on the financial support of individuals to fund its educational and outreach activities. If you found this information useful, please consider becoming a KGI member. Thank you.