[Community_garden] The Phoenix: Community Garden Readies for Another Growing Season

[Alliums]

Hi, Folks!

The Phoenix asked me to write a Guest Column on the community garden.  Here
it is!

 

Dorene

Dorene Pasekoff, Coordinator

St. John's United Church of Christ Organic Community Garden and Labyrinth

 

A mission of 

St. John's United Church of Christ, 315 Gay Street, Phoenixville, PA  19460

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Community Garden Readies for Another Growing Season

By Dorene Pasekoff

 

It's February and while the community garden is quiet, the gardeners are
stirring back to life:  ruffling through seed catalogs, mending cold frames
to set out broccoli seedlings and planning the annual trip to the
Philadelphia Flower Show.

 

Eleven years ago this April, the Housing Authority of Chester County invited
St. John's United Church of Christ to settle its community garden program
(and in 2004, create the 48-foot diameter turf labyrinth for community use)
behind the Fairview Village Housing Project on Phoenixville's North Side.

 

Each year since that invitation was gratefully accepted, the gardeners
gather in March when the Ume tree shakes out its blooms in the face of frost
to repair the ravages of winter.  At Easter, neighborhood children scamper
through wood piles searching for plastic eggs at the Annual Easter Egg Hunt.
On the first Saturday in April, we welcome anyone who wishes to garden
organically and agrees to donate at least 10% of their harvest (the Biblical
Tithe) to those less fortunate to sign up for their own garden plot.
Planting begins after the garden is plowed.  While in May, the gardeners are
already donating radishes, lettuce and other greens to Phoenixville Area
Community Services, the most serious planting doesn't begin until the last
frost date for our area, May 15th.  From that day onward, gardeners work
frantically to set in annuals and tend perennials until the .84 acre bursts
with life, as Sue White captured in her YouTube video last August at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3z0ysB7NfY.

 

Not everyone wants the day-to-day responsibility of a plot so every Tuesday
night, from mid-March to the end of October, the Perennial Garden Volunteers
meet from 5:30 pm until dark, to tend the fruit trees, herbs, 30 antique
rose bushes and other flowering perennials that makes organic agricultural
production possible.  People come as their schedule permits, whenever they
are finished with work and sit together with buckets and trowels to talk and
weed and learn and tease as the dogs play together, or in the heat of
summer, lie quietly in the cool grass.

 

While on some Tuesday nights it seems that we laugh more than we weed, the
gardeners are really all about food production.  Bobby Dean, our eldest
gardener, proudly proclaims "We don't play here" and there probably isn't
anyone in Phoenixville who hasn't eaten at least one meal from his 3 plots.
As the sun goes down on Tuesday nights, gardeners pull out the week's
harvest for Phoenixville Area Community Services, the Cornerstone Clubhouse,
St. Mary's Shelter, the Senior Center and two elderly church ladies who
always know when someone needs a meal. No one worries about "10% of the
harvest" - each gardener looks to see what is ripe, what their family needs
that week and the rest is piled into bags for immediate donation.

 

Mindful that spirit, as well as body, must be fed, we built the turf
labyrinth.  Adults were walking the paths even before its dedication in June
2005. In the summer, young children at Fairview go constantly back and forth
between the playground and the labyrinth until it's too dark to see their
seat on the swings or their feet on the path.

 

Join us this year - for a turn around the labyrinth, to tend a plot, to weed
on a Tuesday night or just to see the antique roses in glorious bloom.  Read
the full story of these last 10 years in the Community/Garden Labyrinth
Proposal at the church's website http://www.stjohnsucc.com/whatsnew.htm or
directly at
http://www.stjohnsucc.com/garden/St%20Johns%20Garden%20Labyrinth%20Proposal.
pdf  This year, see for yourself what St. John's United Church of Christ
Organic Community Garden and Labyrinth is all about.

 

 

Dorene Pasekoff is the Coordinator of St. John's United Church of Christ
Organic Community Garden and Labyrinth.  She can be reached at
alliums at yahoo.com or at 610-933-5311.  

 

 

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