Panthy's Garden

Here’s a statement I can stand behind: most urban surfaces can be improved by the addition of plant life. Just about everything around me for blocks is fully paved by multiple layers of asphalt, cobble stones, more asphalt, and sometimes a very thin layer of dog shit.

Sorry that was gross. But point is, there’s room for trees. There’s room for grass. And there’s most certainly room for growing something to eat. Basically, there’s plenty of opportunity and not enough folks with jackhammers and trees. I’m looking at you people!

Rather than tackling this huge problem head on, artist Steve Wheen is working exclusively in very small increments. The Pothole Gardener is transforming tire-killing voids into tiny scenes of wonder: a miniature park with a tiny lawn chair, a small meadow with a picnic blanket, and a tiny Christmas tree with little gifts. Maybe they’re little boxes of seeds?

I can’t lie, my first impulse when I see these is to stomp them. Which is terrible and is actually not a reflection of how I feel about this art. I think it’s beautiful! But it’s soooo delicate it practically begs to be destroyed.

But that’s the whole point: he’s creating “beautiful little moments” that are completely undermatched by their tough surroundings. The artist notes that almost immediately after installing one of his micro gardens it was destroyed by the tire of a Land Rover.

It begs the question: are temporary, microscopic gardens the answer to ugly, barren cityscapes? Perhaps in getting us to pause and imagine something so much more pleasant than a jagged hole in the ground, Steve Wheen is doing something more powerful: providing us with a tiny snapshot of what else could be.

See more at Steve Wheen’s website and flickr page.

Ever since I ordered my first “café con leche with milk” I’ve wanted to go to Cuba. I love me some Cuban food (I can eat the hell out of some maduros). From what I can tell, Cubans rip around town in amazing classic cars, blasting Cuban music which is basically a huge party for your ears. But perhaps most importantly, Cubans garden their asses off. In an attempt to be free of foreign food imports, they grow a lot of their own food and they generally grow it organically.

The ragged, lush plots in this BBC video kind of remind me of the one my grandfather carved out of his backyard just next to his Airstream trailer. They aren’t pretty in the English garden sense of the word. Their beauty lies in their simplicity and ability to produce amazing food.

Along with some exceptional birthday love, my mom sent me a seed catalog: “Thought this might wet your appetite!”

The miracle of stepping on a plane and being somewhere tropically warm in a few hours is not lost on me. What I burned in jet fuel I hope to offset in pure marvel and respect for flight. Just before landing the pilot said without a trace of humor in his voice,

“In about 10 minutes we’ll set this air machine down on Mother Earth.”

Some pals of mine live in the particularly lush part of West Palm Beach, in a little spot with an awesome landscaper. I stumbled around, blinded by the sun, marveling at the prehistoric looking plants of the neighborhood; utterly astonished.

These plants are HUGE. My garden consists in a clump of huddled, dead or dormant containers, waiting for the day when they can grow again. This garden, a quarter mile from a four-lane city road, is almost a forest. It was put there less than three years ago and you’d never know it by the size of everything.

This used to be a street. The landscaping genius in charge created a gorgeous, shaded path to walk your dog down when he’s not chilling with his junk hanging out, as most Floridian dogs do I’m guessing.

Of course any tropical oasis can be made great with the simple addition of a pool and grill, which seem to be be pretty ubiquitous down there. Though some of the charm was negated by a very specific sign prohibiting anyone with diarrhea from using the pool.

Not far away I found the grandmother of my own disembodied electronic owl S.T.E.V.E.! Her eyes fried from years of intense sunlight.

What I didn’t find were any obvious signs of urban vegetable gardens. There’s gotta be some right? Must be. I bet oranges grow wild around here! Maybe I was looking in the wrong places (burrito restaurants and bars mostly).

Perhaps the ultra wealthy residents of Palm Beach couldn’t be bothered with growing food. What would they want with a damn vegetable garden mussing up their pristine lawns?

I did see an “Obama ‘Bin Lyin’” bumper sticker on a big SUV. There may not be a scientific correlation here, but I’m fairly sure at least this guy probably wasn’t into sustainable agriculture.

Living in a place like New York, with a huge chunk of the year spent under cold gloom, the pressure is on. It’s easy to get obsessive about growing vegetables, or anything for that matter. Gardeners feel especially taunted by the pervasive lack of open space. In Florida, there’s plenty of that. And the weather is awesome. So for the average Floridian, what’s the point in doing anything other than chilling by the pool with your junk hanging out?

My pal James (who likes to tell me how to grill stuff when he comes over) hipped me to this TEDx video by Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International. Roger has a subversive (garden) plot. He pretty much sums up all the reasons to be growing your own food, as if you needed one beyond eating an awesome homegrown tomato.

Here are a few of his points I’d like to raise a pint to:

• Growing your own food is not just a womanly pursuit, it’s a manly pursuit, even if you rock pink gardening gloves.
• Spread the idea of “food sovereignty” or the right to grow your own food and sell it if you like.
• Plant your yard. Grass is for suckas (my words not his).

It’s true, my work retreat last week took place at a Jewish summer camp. Also true, it was a Jewish summer camp on a farm! That’s precisely how awesome my company is. They had goats, turkeys, green houses and paddle boats. Basically all the stuff I want to have on my zombie apocalypse compound.

Because this is a blog about growing stuff, particularly in the city, I’ve resisted sharing my deepening obsession with hacking a remote camp out of the woods. But because I like to grow stuff, my mind has gone crazy with the prospect of actually having LAND to scale up my operation. This here camp farm was scaled up and because it was devoid of hormone addled teenagers I was able to investigate it unimpeded. Here’s what I found:

Goats! Get a load of these guys. After making their acquaintance I bought some of their cheese. Which is awesome by the way. I hope they see some of the profits.

In a weird cycle of life kinda thing, I discovered some tanning goat hides too, stretched out and salted heavily. Maybe they were for drums? Hats? Vests? We may never know.

The green house was pretty awesome, and still very much in use despite the dipping temperatures. In the daytime it was downright balmy in there! In the evening these blankets covered a multitude of thriving greens, arugula, lettuce, Swiss chard, and collards. I felt rude having the door open for the picture. “What’d ya grow up in a barn?! Shut the door!”

I’m not sure how much you remember about summer camp. Maybe you never went, which would be sad. What I remember is that 80% of all teenage hippies were camp counselors. So it came as no surprise that this camp had a hippie bus!

I will not try to make sense of this for you. If you don’t get it, I can’t help you man. Know what I mean bro? Also on hand was a very trippy BREAD OVEN made of a FACE. You feed the face and it feeds you back! Is your mind blown yet?

There was the somewhat eerie basketball court, balls dropped right where they were when the summer season ended. And of course the somewhat depressing paddle boat filled with ice.

Camp was definitely over, but there was plenty of evidence of continued comfortable camp living straight through the winter. Solar panels! Hacking tools! Fire pit!

Everything I saw there seemed to make sense on my imaginary wooded retreat. But now the idea of just a simple cabin in the woods had blossomed into a fully operational, self-sustaining FARM.

The city is all about scaling down. While the buildings are scaled up, our apartments (and gardens) are scaled down. But maybe the ingenuity of the urban gardener can be applied with success in the great wide open.

Raised beds make sense out here too, and possibly some sub-irrigation for them would increase yields and keep water consumption down? Rainwater harvest certainly makes just as much sense in the woods as in the city. I bet growing on the rooftops of these outbuildings could actually be a more effective deterrent to deer than a fence. (It may also be a deterrent against gardening depending on how good you are at building shack roofs.)

The possibilities are as endless as the acres in the country. Now all I need is a few of those acres. And maybe a hippie bus. And a bread oven face? Sure, why not?