free digger
wIn Search of Soil
Last spring I tried to facilitate a soil delivery for the Granite Street Garden. I had a graciously officious email exchange with Susan Fields, who at the time was GreenThumb‘s deputy director. She is now the program manager for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s GreenBridge program.
Turns out the last workshops that GreenThumb offered in Brooklyn to qualify for soil delivery were in October. Damn. A February 13 workshop in the Bronx was our last chance to qualify, unless we wanted to go to a worm composting workshop at lefty bookstore Bluestockings next week. Because the Manhattan workshop was clearly designed for the convenience of Lower East Side gardeners, who are disproportionately white, and not the gardeners in Harlem, who are proportionately people of color, I just couldn’t bring myself to support it.
Well, as a veteran of fighting City Hall, I can’t say that you can’t do it and win. But I can say that City Hall will always extract its pound of flesh. So even though I’ve been composting for 30 years, and even though I set up a composting facility at the Garden of Union that GreenThumb and others uses as a showpiece, I hauled my ass up to the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx last night for a “Crazy for Composting” workshop in order to quality my garden for a delivery of soil.
As you can tell, everything about this set-up was a recipe to piss me off royally. But since I try to practice Buddhism, I know that feeding the flames of anger will just make me more miserable than anything else. So I worked on calming my anger all the way up on the D train to Bedford Park Blvd. stop, then walking 8 blocks to the gate of the botanic garden, then a series of dark parking lots, until I finally found the classroom.
Juniper tried to coax one of the other gardeners from Granite Street to attend the workshop, too. So he tried to Hopstop the directions to make it easier. Here’s his comments:
I think these folks really need a kick.
These directions are like a treasure hunt. Travel from Brooklyn to the Bronx, only one available gate. I have gone on the NY Botanic garden website, I can’t figure out the gate. There is no street address so it does not google or hopstop. Make the wrong turn and you are disqualified.
When I got there, I saw there were a couple old friends. So I wouldn’t say it was worth it, but it was nice to see Karen and Eileen.
The workshop teacher, Jodie Colón, did an enthusiastic, sometimes even funny, job. But the lesson plan was like: what is compost? how does it happen? how do you use it?
I repeat, I’ve been composting for 30 years. This was basically a reprise of the enforced boredom of working class public school.
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