Grassroots Nourishment

I just completed a six-month-long book tour and pilgrimage visiting gardens, interdependent bookstores, and lively Zen corners from Clackskanie, Oregon to Asheville, North Carolina. Throughout the country I met and meditated with a strong grassroots network of citizens pursuing a radically democratic approach to food and agriculture rooted in the common ground of justice, health, beauty, and nourishment. To my delight, one of the most vibrant projects I visited this year was on home turf: the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden in the heart of downtown San Francisco.

This garden is the collaborative brainchild of Slow Food Nation—a project of Slow Food USA—and the San Francisco Garden for the Environment. The Victory Garden concept is inspired by historic success and the modern intention to create a public food garden from scratch on the front lawn of the San Francisco Civic Center. This spot was the original site of a dynamic World War II victory garden that fed local residents from 1941 to 1943, providing more than eight million tons of fresh produce as one of twenty million victory gardens nationwide. Forty-one percent of all the food grown in the USA during the Second World War was grown in victory gardens.

The Slow Food Nation Victory Garden, designed by local landscape architect John Bela, was a community effort from its origin. Sunnyside Organic Nursery and the west Oakland nonprofit City Slicker Farm grew all of the food plants for the garden, along with hundreds of vegetable seedlings donated by Green Gulch Farm Zen Center.

Kelsey Siegel, garden manager and community educator for the Victory Garden, is a close friend and colleague with whom I have worked in East Bay public school gardens for seven years. Just after the summer solstice in late June, Kelsey described to me the huge communal effort underway to establish the Victory Garden in time for the inaugural Labor Day weekend gathering of Slow Food Nation, when more than 60,000 visitors would converge in the Bay Area to support an American food system that is clean, delicious, and fair.

The Victory Garden team began this grassroots effort by removing the grass roots of an old sod lawn in front of the Civic Center, a grueling process that took almost a full week. Next, bare earth was shaped and raked, and straw wattles—long, soft chains of burlap stuffed with rice straw—were laid out to create twenty large, circular beds backfilled with truckloads of donated soil and compost.

On the communal planting day in early July, two hundred volunteers showed up to install drip irrigation and plant thousands of garden seedlings. After the wattle beds were planted, decomposed granite was tamped down around them. The day closed with a celebratory meal served at tables flanking the Victory Garden.

By mid-August the harvest of fresh produce began in earnest. Between fifty and one hundred fifty pounds of broccoli, lettuce, kale, snap and
shell beans, and rainbow chard were delivered to the San Francisco Food Bank every week. Families, friends, and school groups continued to flood the garden during the day, perching on the round wattle garden beds to eat lunch and admire the six-foot tall Hopi blue corn plants.

In the Civic Center neighborhood, long a desolate place marked by addiction, hunger, and homelessness, a magnificent Victory Garden now welcomes hundreds of garden pilgrims every day. Kelsey harvests a daily bounty of memories and stories told by the visitors. “I grew up on a farm,” people often begin, or, “It wasn’t an easy life, but we always had food on the table.”

Now, as Veteran’s Day approaches, the sun rides low in the saddle of late Indian summer. The Slow Food Nation garden will be dismantled soon after Thanksgiving, as was always the plan. All remaining food from the garden, as well as the perennial plant material, the good soil in the beds, and the straw wattles and fencing, have been promised to Project Homeless Connect, which plans to start new Victory gardens in the spring. Meanwhile, I am enjoying the glorious senescence of the Civic Center garden while remembering the Buddha’s teaching that all conditioned existence is of the nature to come apart. Even in seasonal decline the Victory Garden expresses a grassroots commitment that all beings in the ten directions come to the table and be fed.

Wendy Johnson is Tricycle's longest-running columnist; her first "On Gardening" column appeared in the Summer 1995 issue. Her new book is Gardening at the Dragon's Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World.

[Photos © Kelsey Siegel (right) and Daniel Homsey (left and front page)]

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