Midway through a muggy Maryland summer it dawned on me that under certain circumstances our dirty city could become a veritable Edan. Standing amidst 7-foot tall sunflowers, the wide leaves of squash plants, and tomato plants dripping with plump red fruit I realized Baltimore has untold natural resources in its rich soil, soaking rains and brow-beating summer sunshine.
While flies, bees and mosquitoes buzzed about my legs, I stood grinning at lavender, beets, peppers and purple blossoms. We had barely pulled a weed in months and the plot’s watering barrel was nearly empty.
Actually, I didn’t do much at all to make this tiny plot on Pratt Street blossom. The digging, hoeing, planting, and weeding was done by a dogged group of 10 kids ages 5 to 11: The Wolfe Street Academy Garden Club (Baltimore’s other untold resources: seriously great kids).
In March, the plot–maybe 11 feet by 20 feet in size –was covered in weeds, recovering from being flattened by months of snowfall. Broken bottles, cigarette butts, and rocks littered the plot. Where three row houses were bulldozed in the 1980s, glass still glittered through many layers of dirt.
The boys helped Marissa, a nursing student with a green thumb, to dig furrows to demarcate planting areas from walking areas, which we would later fill with mulch. Marissa discovered the idea to create furrows while gardening at East Baltimore’s Participation Park, which offers free classes on growing things. Later I learned from a man at Participation Park –gardening to a thumping reggae beat from his truck–how to sift rocks and debris out of soil using screens.
With light, sifted soil–like baking flour, soil is most rich when it isn’t packed and littered with lumps–we started planting at Pratt Street.
Scarlet, a whip-smart 10-year old, was in charge. She carefully placed seeds of squash, mixed lettuce and beets in the soil under 1/4 inch of soil, as the packet instructed. She carefully wrote the names of what we had planted sideways on wooden chopsticks and stuck them in the ground. Day-dreamy Adriana and mischievous Christian came with watering cans to moisten the soil. The kids had learned from a med student/plant wizard named Sean about how seeds come to sprout. They just need water and soil, so they put some of that in the bottom of plastic water bottles and took them home to place on their window sills. A week later, the kids returned, jubilant to see tiny sunflower and watermelon seedlings coming up from the dirt encased in plastic.
We had some hiccups along the way. The tomato seeds did nothing in the ground. The beets and watermelon seeds disappeared into the dirt never to emerge. I was worried. What good is a Maryland garden without tomatoes? Then we had a breakthrough: A friend of a friend from the Wyman dog park had three dozen tomato plants, of different breeds, that he wanted to off-load. We took 10 — exchanged them for strawberries we had picked up at Baugher’s.
As for the beets and watermelon seeds that had refused to materialize as seedlings, Sean started them inside and when they were small but stubborn green plants we put them on the last free furrow.
Meanwhile, the lettuce had come up. It waved in varied shapes and sizes, pale green in the late spring sun. It was like the salad bar at Whole Food with all the arugula and radicchio. The sunflowers that the kids planted–we admonished them over and over at the beginning not to step on them– were a foot taller every week until they towered over the kids, who played among their thick stalks like children in a deep forest. They painted ladybugs and Mexican flags on stones to decorate the garden, a project developed by a creative teacher named Lizzie.
Fast-forward to July. We’d been having the routine near-tropical Chesapeake rain storms, and lots of muggy sun. Everything had sprouted up and over–the neat rows of green seedlings had become a jungle of rough leaves, whizzing insects and crawling beetles. A summer school crop of 2nd graders were not afraid. They watered the roots of the watermelon plant, it’s tentacles sprawling out into the lavender and rosemary on the garden’s end. They spotted the pollinators of the garden: Bees, ants, lady bugs, and flies. They went
crazy for roly polly bugs, walking back to class carefully with a pillbug crawling across their palms.
While some of the original garden club had broken up for summer, this new group (with a couple holdovers) got to taste the tomatoes and zucchini they had planted. Cherry tomatoes, in their tiny firm roundness, were foreign and suspicious. They could be plopped like marbles into mouths, and spat right out. They could be squashed between small fingers. Eww! Later, we cut them in half. Then: Delicious! Zucchini was also a hit. Even kale was gobbled up when it had nice olive oil dressing on it, a coup orchestrated by Molly, a policy student who has run school garden clubs in Detroit.
The vast majority of kids in this Upper Fell’s Point neighborhood grow up in poor households. Parents may be forced to leave the country with no notice to return home to Central America or Mexico. Many parents speak no English at all. But dirt and bugs are a combination that, regardless of demographic status, are a surefire hit with the pre-pre-teen set.
Liz, an energetic Hopkins medicine student who concocted the idea of starting a garden club at Wolfe Street, knew that the benefits of longterm garden and healthy eating projects are manifold. Research has demonstrated that they can help children shed excess weight and also improve concentration and learning at school. The Food for Life school plan, developed by Antonia Demas, help children grow vegetables and understand nutrition. After eating new healthy dishes, a student called Willie said he could, “just feel my brain thinking better.” He and his friends realized that vegetables don’t have to be “nasty.”
The Wolfe Street kids loved getting outside and exploring the garden from a bug’s eye view. Unfortunately my tenure with the club has ended but I hope the club continues to explore the outdoors and try new foods.
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