Past the Last Frost!

After all of the excitement of The Odyssey, I woke up early and headed off to our community garden on the next block for our annual Spring Communal Clean-Up.

For those of you who don't know, Louis and I were part of a Community Garden for ten years that was located across the alley and a few lots down from our current location. That garden, called the Grand Avenue Garden, was three city lots in full sun that, amazingly, had never been built on. Having augmented the soil in our plots for over ten years, the place produced great veggies and flowers and provided a nice place for the customers at the coffee shop across the street to sit. There were 17 15' x 10' plots in that garden.

Sadly, three years ago the owner of the lots passed away and as it was the middle of the condo craze here in Minneapolis, his family sold the lots. The greedy developer couldn't wait to get started and so in the middle of July, with lots of green tomatoes and little green beans coming in, he kicked us out and scraped the lot with a bulldozer.

A few of us scrambled and found homes in the lesser-regarded Pleasant Avenue Garden across the alley. Only one city lot, the garden had always been the ugly step-sister of the two because it was quite shaded by weed trees that had grown up along the lot line of the crazy cat lady house that had been there prior to the neighborhood buying the lot and putting it in a green space trust.

I moved the rhubarb and tried to move some of the perennials that we had, but the bulldozers were too eager and we lost an established raspberry patch and much, much more. Alas.

The first year that Grand gardeners were in the Pleasant Ave. Garden we spent most of our time, outside of our personal plots, trying to re-establish the beautiful Victorian design of the garden. As it was shady and under-populated, the place was very overgrown and run down. The longtime gardeners didn't seem to know what had hit them.

The second year that we were there a great number of gardens turned over, as about half of the gardeners are earnest young people who tend to be transient; they move for a job or they move in with a friend and they're gone. In the middle of the year we found a fellow who is an arborist and loves community gardens. He offered to remove a bunch of the nasty trees along the southern lot line for us for a pittance and he did a beautiful job of it. At the same time, four of the enormous elms on the boulevard (east) side of the garden were taken down by the city. This left a HUGE hole in the sky and we haven't seen our Sharp Shinned Hawk since, but together the two have made the garden much, much sunnier, which will be good for everyone.

This year we have a handful of new gardeners and lots of returnees. I think the tide may have turned for the Pleasant Avenue Garden, as during the work day we weeded all of the borders, added soil to the plots, weeded all of the paths, trimmed overhanging limbs from the remaining trees and more. We have a composting composter (instead of a garbage bin!) and people are really enthused.

The rose that Ted and Louis bought me last year for Mother's Day survived the winter and so did most of the strawberry bed that Louis and I planted last year. The clematis that we planted on the outer fence on the north are back and growing and it didn't take very long at all this year to weed the fern and wild rose plot in the neighbors' yard that had previously been the source of a lot of Creeping Charley that came into the garden.

In Louis' plot the ferns are up along with the Pachysandra and the Bleeding Heart that we moved there last year from home when we split the big plants in the back yard.

Louis and my niece Charlotte (11), who lives three blocks from us and is a fellow gardener along with her parents, were the sapling patrol and Thành spent most of the work period sitting in Uncle Tim's Korean-era Willys Jeep pretending to drive. We all headed home at eleven, having been disciplined enough to stay out of our own plots, as hard as it was.