Grow-a-Thon takes off
Permaculture gardener Erik Ohlsen helped spearhead the iGrow Sonoma 350 Challenge in his Sebastopol neighborhood. Ohlsen has planted more than 80 fruit trees along with berries and vegetables on his 1/3-acre lot.
John Burgess / PDPublished: Friday, June 25, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, June 26, 2010 at 3:34 p.m.
When Sonoma County leaders last winter cooked up the idea of a massive community grow-a-thon, their goal was to get a garden growing on every block.
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The iGrowSonoma.org website includes not only a map of all registered vegetable gardens both public, private and community, but gardening tips, gardening resources and a listing of upcoming events and classes related to vegetable growing.
That ambitious plan may be wishful thinking. But since the gauntlet was laid down on a new iGrowSonoma website in February, hundreds of gardens located at schools, businesses, public buildings and private backyards, have been registered.
The total land under cultivation is still modest — only about 17 acres. But many of the gardens are small home plots with charming names like “A Garden of Eatin' ” “A Mouse in the Pantry Garden,” “Raw Fooders Delight,” “Ascending Keyhole Garden” and the “Cat Bird Seat Garden.”
All corners of the county are contributing, from Cotati to Petaluma, Penngrove to Bloomfield, Healdsburg to Santa Rosa, Windsor to Guerneville and Sonoma to Rohnert Park.
It was organized by Health Action, a consortium of public agencies and private groups in the county assembled by the Board of Supervisors to address issues about public health with real programs.
The effort really took off the weekend of May 15 and 16 — the height of the spring planting season — with the 350 Garden Challenge. More than 600 projects were undertaken during that single weekend blitz.
In a few cases, entire blocks came together in an old-fashioned, neighbor-helping-neighbor kind of way.
Among them was Nelson Way in Sebastopol, a quiet lane of modest homes and townhouses, where multiple generations of residents are creating a small community within their broader community, all built around sharing and gardening. Helping hands that weekend transformed 81-year-old Natalie Rogers' front lawn into a drought-tolerant landscape and created a modest veggie garden of raised beds for single mom Carol Vanek. Another neighbor provided food for the troops of volunteers.
The efforts of that weekend hopefully laid the foundation for an ongoing and growing movement of mutual help and support on their block, said Erik Ohlsen, a 31-year-old father of two who is a garden designer and installer specializing in permaculture.
He has been slowly bringing Nelson Way together with his own garden, a permaculture paradise of fruit tree, ponds, chickens, insectaries and swales he created from nothing in the past two years.
In fact, he had been working on Rogers for more than a year, trying to convince her to get rid of her thirsty lawn and replace it with natives. The 350 Challenge weekend provided a great incentive to just get it done.
“I used to garden, but I can't anymore,” said Rogers, a psychologist and expressive arts therapist whose father was the renowned humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers. As an octogenarian with back issues, she just can't do the physical work demanded of gardening. But Ohlsen and other friends and neighbors could. Rogers stirred up the chilled lemonade while volunteers swooped in on a Saturday and laid cardboard and mulch over the lawn she'd been drying out since last year. On Sunday, the team returned to plant, install drip irrigation and lay a dry creekbed and pipes that will capture rainwater from her roof and refilter it into her yard.
“The one thing this has done is spread in the neighborhood. Erik inspires us,” said Rogers. “I never would have done it if he hadn't been across the street, because I wouldn't know who to get or how to go about it.”
Sharing not only brawn but experience and expertise is another advantage of neighborhood gardening, said Ohlsen. As a professional garden installer who began seriously studying permaculture at Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, he is always happy to share what he knows, from what to plant and where to plant it.
Vanek said she was completely confounded by what to do with some miserable and misplaced raised beds.
“I didn't know what to do. My place is covered with trees and there's just a little sunny spot. The beds were off-looking. I wasn't inspired. I kept wondering, ‘How do I do this?' But with Erik it was just bam bam bam. He came in with a little tractor and tore out this and that and moved things around. They just swarmed in like little bees. It was fabulous because I'm a single mom and not able to do this hard work myself.”
When the dust had settled, volunteers had rebuilt and placed her beds in a better location to catch the best sun, brought in soil and compost and planted tomatoes, tree collards, lemon cucumbers, cilantro, basil and beets.
Neighborhood gardening also allows people to share equipment and materials, said Ohlsen, who has created a small cooperative community with friends who live in townhouses adjoining his property. People can borrow what they need. Rogers, for example, may not be able to do heavy work but she does her part. She brings collects her compost and totes it over to the Ohlsen's across the street, to feed their worm bin.
Ohlsen recommends that other blocks thinking of similarly organizing designate a communal spot — someone's yard or garden — where people can gather for meetings, get-togethers and socials, sort of an information private park.
“The most important thing is to have a venue where people can come together and talk,” said Ohlsen, whose own «-acre lot has become the informal community center of Nelson Way. Kids come and play in the garden and plant seeds. Ohlsen will then share the small starts with friends and neighbors.
Ohlsen's own garden serves as an example to other homeowners in the neighborhood that even the most degraded of yards can be turned into fertile spaces. He bought his property only two years ago, and at the time it was completely covered in concrete and asphalt. Now it is alive with 82 fruit trees, ponds that have attracted croaking bullfrogs, tons of berries and hummingbird attractors like Lavatera.
He plans to soon create earthen cob benches along the front of his property that will encourage people walking down the street to stop and talk. Once his food production ramps up, he'll set up a permanent counter where he'll lay out extra bounty for the taking.
“Since our garden is pretty young, we don't have the kind of harvest that we will have. But in a few years we'll have an incredible abundance of food coming out of here,” Ohlsen said. “All of this is part of the plan. It isn't about short-term goals but about creating lasting, multi-generational relationships.”
You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204.
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