past garden projects number one castle street

Nostalgia can be one of my weak points, especially when looking at pictures and such from years ago, garden pictures in particular. I have taken on a few garden projects in Wilmington over the last decade, some for myself, some for other people, on rented, donated and abandoned land. Each project was unique in its perspective and scope, from community based plots to market gardens. This series of posts will be a short retrospective on the three projects that I have been able to find pictures of.

Six years ago, myself and handful of others – probably half the entire anarchist community in Wilmington at the time – set out to transform a grassy parking lot on the corner of 4th and Castle into a small garden. In my personal time line this was pre-Kristin, pre-Noel and Danielle, back when most of my time was spent in community activism or traveling to protests and direct actions or working an office job.

Prior to this garden idea, some other folks had tried to get a farm stand going on the property to resell local produce. That didn’t get far. Another person had just ended their organic food buying club, distributing the bi-weekly shares out of the building on the property.

We had ideas for the building too, all of which never happened. We wanted to have a community radio station, an infoshop, a coffee shop, and on and on. Every idea had some road block, everything from zoning to the FCC to generating enough money to actually buy the books we wanted to distribute in the infoshop. So we focused on the small plot of soil presented to us.

This garden was a chance to get some literal roots established among the concrete and asphalt and toxic soil. The land was basically donated to us along with the ability to use the building on the property to store tools, seeds and pots. The project was simple – turn the grass into garden beds and distribute the food that grew to all the participants.

Big ideas came and went, the ground was tilled, manure and compost spread, buckets collected, compost bins constructed, beds outlined. The work didn’t take long as long as people showed up. And they did, at first, but folks gradually moved away from the garden after the first year.

The first year was prep work and cover crops, kind of boring, tedious work if your vision was in instantly harvesting squash and beans. I guess my vision was a bit longer, so I stayed with it. It became more and more a solo effort during the winter.

The second year we planted a bunch of annual vegetables and some fruit trees. I had met Kristin by this point, and the garden became one of our first projects together. Other folks came and went, contributing a few hours here and there which we would write down in a log book.

Year three was the final year of the garden. The owners of the place had rented the building out to some people who did car detailing. The renters wanted the garden for parking the cars as they cleaned them. The renters were also pilfering the garden during the days we didn’t stop by, cutting the flowers and picking the peppers and tomatoes. This was discouraging in itself, but returning the garden to a parking lot after three years of work was very aggravating. I don’t know how long the garden would have lasted. I do know that it would have gotten better and better as I learned more and more about what was going on in that particular dirt.

Today there are few signs that the garden was ever there. I can’t even really look at the place when I pass by, but I have always hoped that some of the veggies went feral, messing up the parking lot…

A lot did come from this project. I ended up running a organic produce buying club for a few years and also started up a traveling infoshop that I took to shows and community events for about four years. I also learned a lot about building soil and starting from scratch, things that will help as the projects get bigger.