Trying to garden in Oakland is like training a housecat to ride a bike. The waitlist for the city-run garden plots is too long to cope with, and the city does not exactly encourage the creation of new such community gardens. My back porch is choked with containers growing tomatoes, strawberries, bean sprouts, chard, mustard greens, and lemon verbena, but the containers do not satisfy the urge to get one’s hands deep into the soil, and the plants are also not so satisfied with this restriction.
The front of my apartment building is donned with two plots of plant space, each around 10 by 25 feet. All the plants (except for what seems t0 be a volunteer cilantro plant in its flowering stage) are typical lets-just-cover-some-space landscaping plants. Granted, some of the flowers are gorgeous and much-needed, but even still, I held that this small parcel of earth could be put to work to satisfy some basic subsistence needs as well as psychological contentment.
The plots are covered in life-suppressing mulch where the landscape plants do not grow. Upon observing some of these in-between places, I decided to utilize them for gardening purposes. In went my other lemon verbena cutting, in went a squash, some broccoli (i know, not the season, but my roomie sprouted them for whatever reason), in went a pumpkin (also, roomie, is it really the season?), and in went a tomatillo. At another interstice, in went a tomato transplant, in went melon and bean seeds. The other day, in went three cukes and an eggplant.
Back to the training cats to ride bicycles, the apartment manager came out to walk her dog and discovered me watering the newly transplanted tomato plant. She said accusingly, “What are you doing?”
“I’m planting a tomato plant!” I replied in an excited and naive tone.
“But I don’t think this is your property.”
“It belongs to the building, doesn’t it?”
Shaking her head, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I will ask the owner.” I didn’t hear anything more about it, and so far, my babies are intact. I painted on a brick ‘Garden Please Do Not Disturb’ to mark one spot.
The owner of the building, by the way, is a faceless corporation. So nice to feed the usurers, while others do all the work (the managers– I am sympathetic despite the excessive grumpiness).
When I left the farm to return to Oakland, I knew my gardening capabilities would take on this character, and that I would be forced to plant in the overlooked extra spaces that do not exist as one large swath, but rather as a collection of interstices that demand a different set of strategies of locale and care, and involve education (training, if you will) of the residents in new values and aesthetic standards.
