Milking the plants: Annette on her daily rounds. Credit: Paul Bass Photo Posted inFood

by Paul Bass

Annette (she declined to make her last name public) was making her morning rounds at the row of planter boxes she tends on the green lot at Garden and Edgewood. She’s been harvesting a second round of collard greens she planted there this year. On Tuesday she planted a third round of collards in an empty spot in one of her boxes. On Wednesday she mapped out the spots in between another bunch of collard plants she had partially picked the day before. She decided that later in the day she would put in a last batch of new plants in those gaps.

“Those will come up before December,” she vowed.

Annette has tended the garden on the lot for two years. Another neighbor had grown plants there before that when the city owned the lot. He dubbed it “Sojourn Market,” as a sign he placed there still partially reads. He invited neighbors to share in the produce and envisioned a nourishing community space. Eventually the project ended.

The Greater Dwight Development Corporation bought the lot two years ago with the intention of keeping it as well-tended greenspace for the neighborhood, said Executive Director Linda Townsend Maier. The group contracted with Annette to plant and tend the garden there.

It was good timing: Annette needed a new place to garden. She began growing vegetables five years ago in the nearby apartment complex where she lives, after she retired from decades working in factories and St. Raphael’s hospital. Then the landlord threatened to evict her for gardening without permission. She said she had to pay a $130 fine to keep her apartment.

At the former Sojourn Market spot, she grows tomatoes and thyme and lettuce in addition to the rows of collards. “People like vegtables. I like vegatbles. We all eat vegetables.”

“This garden is organic,” Annette emphasized. She avoids chemical fertilizers; she tried a tip she saw on TV to use milk instead. She pours it on her collard plants. “It worked. That’s why it came up big and nice.”

She hands much of the food out to neighbors. “I tell them, ‘Don’t steal. If you see me, ask me.’” She brings the rest home to cook. She sautees the collards with sesasonings and cabbage. 

“We’re really happy to have her” tending the lot’s garden, Townsend Maier said. “She’ a neighborhood person. She’s passionate” about making green nourishment grow.