Creating a Front Yard Garden to Engage the Community- Sustainable Living
Creating a Front Yard Garden to Engage the Community- Sustainable Living
Creating a Front Yard Garden to Engage the Community featuring The Moon Gardener, Chantal Lemoine. This is part of the Humans Who Grow Food and Robin Greenfield series. Humans Who Grow Food features stories of home gardeners, farmers and community gardens across borders and cultures.
Follow Chantal: themoongardener.com – Instagram @themoongardener
Follow Humans Who Grow Food: humanswhogrowfood.com – Facebook – Instagram @humanswhogrowfood – Twitter – YouTube
Transcript: The following is a transcription of Creating a Front Yard Garden to Engage the Community — Sustainable Living.
I am Chantal. I am a retired physician and a moon gardener.
Lunar gardening has been going on for centuries. Farmers have developed it, but it has become more of a “science.”
I started planting according to the lunar cycles. I have found that by putting it into practice, things grow much faster than they would otherwise. I think it has to do with putting yourself in sync with the rhythms of the seasons, the rhythms of the earth, and the rhythms of planting. I think that when you put yourself in sync with the seasons, when you are in touch with nature, you feel different. You are more grounded. It is a different feeling. I think that is what permeates this garden.
As a result of the fact that this garden is on a street corner, there is a lot of foot traffic around it. I do not have a fence, so it does not make any sense for me to try to keep things to myself. It was almost out of necessity that I created a garden that is open to the community. This happens to be where I can garden, so I am gardening out front. That necessity pulled me out of myself. It pulled me out of my depression. It put me back in touch with the community.
Now, a lot of different things have grown out of it. I put out this little stand which has become an exchange. When I have excess produce, I put it in there. People can pick it up. When people have excess stuff from the neighborhood, they come and they put it there. It is a really nice way for people to share what they have got.
I started the garden on this little plot right here, which is about 10 by 20 feet. That was the very first garden. Everything else, when I started gardening, was lawn, except for a little border over here. When I first started gardening, it was not really in my mind to do anything other than plant a few flowers and have a pretty garden. The real urge to garden came about after I got really sick. I hurt my back and had a couple of spine operations. The recovery was very difficult and long. I was on a lot of medication. I became very depressed. I found a very hard time motivating myself to do anything. I had so much pain I could not stand for very long to do anything inside the house. It was hard to imagine that I could even do anything outside. But I had this urge. It was like an elemental force that said, “Come and do this. You can do this.” I did not listen at first because it seemed impossible when I could not stand up to cook a meal. How was I going to come out and build a garden? But that voice would not stop. It said, “Yeah, you can do this. You can do this. Come out and garden.”
One day, I remembered that I had this little stool that rolled around. I put on my back brace and I slipped an ice pack in the back here. I came out and before I knew it, I had cleared up this space. Within a few days, I planted my very first garden. I got enough vegetables out of that very first garden to share with a lot of people. That is what got me going.
This part is the herb garden. I always tell my students, if you must have an herb garden, you must put it very close to your front door. It has to be within a few steps so that when you want something, you can walk out, clip it, and walk back inside. I have parsley, oregano, all of my culinary herbs. I also grow some medicinal herbs. I have lemon balm, lemon verbena, feverfew. I like to make my own soaps. I make my own creams and lotions. I use the herbs and the flowers from the garden to infuse oil. From those oils, I make the different products. That is pretty much what we use for the whole family. I make enough so that I can ship out to my family at Christmas time. That is my Christmas gift.
Lavender is one of my favorite plants. It is one of my favorite scents. I think it is really calming. If you have any kind of anxiety, you want to have lavender growing in your garden as a stress reliever. It is a wonderful scent. This is French lavender. I propagated it and grew a whole hedge out of that one plant. This is one of the things I taught during the class.
I specifically created a path from one side to the other to encourage people to come through the garden, to wander, to cut through, and to sit down if they wish. I have a lot of fruit trees growing. This is my guava tree. You can see some guavas. I am going to be making guava jelly this year. This is a tatsuma tangerine. That is a mango tree right there. It gave some beautiful mangoes. There is a cherimoya tree, a couple of pear trees, and plum and nectarine.
We have always got kale growing. I like to keep the kale right in front because I encourage people to pick it themselves. The kids love to come by and pull the kale and chew on it.
This is my vegetable exchange stand. People bring things that they have extras of. Whenever I have any extras, I put it in there. Whatever is there, the neighborhood partakes.
I have a few more beans growing. This was loaded up with beans. You can see they are really drying up. I have left them on the vine to dry up because I want the seeds for next year. I do not have to go buy any more seeds. I collect the dry seed pods. Wait till they are completely dry and then I use those seeds for my next year’s crop.
At the end, that little thing, that little pole with the can at the top, that is where I put peanuts for my friend, Bluejay. He comes and eats the peanuts, but he stays around and eats the bugs, too. I encourage him to visit the garden because that is my pest control. I have bird feeders hanging all through the garden for that same reason because if you bring the birds to your garden, they will help you out by eating the insects.
Today with the children of the neighborhood, we planted the box. This is our winter vegetable box. We planted kale, lettuce, broccoli, onions. There is cauliflower and there are flowers growing to attract beneficial insects all throughout the box. At the bottom, it is full of logs. It is called hugelkultur. Because it is very expensive to fill a box with a lot of soil, you can get away by putting a bunch of twigs and grasses and everything at the bottom. Put about four inches of soil. That is all you need to grow. As things go along, the branches will decompose and rot and turn into soil. That is what is going on with this box.
We planted a bunch of trees along the parkway now that we have permission to grow food on the parkways. I have citrus growing on the parkway. The outside of the garden is not irrigated at all. It only depends on whether I water it or the weather waters it. That is because it is meant to be a permaculture garden, so it should not depend on watering. It is hard to maintain at first, but once you get it going, you have no worries. It keeps itself going.
It may not be obvious to put roses, but roses are actually really hardy. They are drought tolerant. They will reward you with a profusion of flowers whenever it starts to rain again. I find them good plants to intersperse. These are my favorite roses. I plant roses in remembrance of people. When I lose a friend or a family relative, I plant a rose bush. This is my aunt’s rose bush. She likes yellow roses. There is one planted for my mother. It is my way of keeping their memory alive.
I have one more plant that, in terms of memory and keeping things alive, is really important to me, that I would like to show you. It is over here. It is right by my door. It is not a very showy plant at all. It does not look fabulous, but it means a lot. This aloe plant was given to me as a gift from a family that has preserved it since the middle passage. This particular plant made it through the middle passage, was smuggled aboard ship by a slave. It was grown in the fields of America. That family escaped to freedom in Canada. They took the plant with them and grew it over there. Some of them came back to the United States. They came to Maryland. They brought the plant to Maryland. Some of them moved not too far from here, a few blocks away. I was lucky enough to get a piece of it. We do not have very many things to connect us to our past. There is a big block that has been taken away from us. To have anything that you can touch, that carries the memory of your ancestors. They are not even blood related. To me, this is my talisman. It is amazing to have this. It is amazing.
I take my inspirations from some people that I really admire. Vandana Shiva is one of my heroes. She started the seed saving movement in northern India after the epidemic of farmer suicides up there. She has been a real force against Monsanto. She established an organization that has revitalized seed saving and heirloom seeds in India. She is an amazing woman. She is one of my inspirations. She says that to garden, to produce your own food, is a revolutionary act. Right now, we are so enslaved by our systems, our food production systems, the way that they have been set up. There is not enough response to demand. Our food is shipped from all over the place. You do not know what is on it. You do not know what pesticides are on it, what preservatives. Half the time it has been picked before it is ripe. It has been subjected to gas in order to ripen it artificially. It is not real nutritious food. It is really important, I think, to everyone, to get their hands in the dirt, and to get back to growing something, whatever it is, on your balcony, wherever you can find some open space, a little sunshine. Grow something. It will make you better. It will make your life better.
