able gardener 1 September Post

The past few weeks, I am thinking about food security and the labour of those who cultivate the food we eat. I have been working as a TA for a course on Global Education and Social Justice for pre-service teachers and we have been discussing migrant justice issues… we have just finished readings about migrant farm workers. In particular I am thinking about Deborah Barndt’s work on the Tomasita Project, which is described in her book Tangled Routes. Barndt traces the path of the tomato from cultivation to packaging and marketing in North American supermarkets. Again, I think the Children’s Garden could draw links to these readings. I think many educators underestimate young children’s understanding of social, political and economic issues, and the kind of analysis they are capable of.

able 1 Spiral

August: Barb. Pat and I worked with clay, placing spirals around the garden. This visceral experience was fascinating… holding the clay facilitated a sense of wonder and appreciation for the growth of this garden… in spite of such adverse conditions, the garden continues to flourish… I am really moved by the resilience of these relatively small gardens surrounded by clattering and sputtering machines. I think it would make a wonderful metaphor for a children’s book… B’s project also reminds me of a children’s book I have been writing for some time. It is called The Spaghetti Garden and it is inspired by my friend who immigrated to Canada from Italy after the Second World War. She is an avid gardener and recounts stories describing the significance of her garden in her first years in Montreal. After9/11, she saw many parallels between how she was treated as an immigrant from a fascist society, and the emerging Islamaphobia at the time [of 9/11]. After watching the news, she would say to me: You have to remember that this was a time when most people in Montreal had never heard of spaghetti. Hearing her experiences as a young person in a new country made me think of her garden as a metaphor for resilience… and the resilience of the garden at Ottawa U reminds me of her stories.

“Every landscape is a hermetic narrative”

Below are portraits of the other boxes of plants which live on the Ottawa U campus nearby to “escapelot”, what Lucy Lippard in The Lure of the Local might call “the geography of no where…. placelessness may simply be place ignored, unseen or unknown”.  I see the interchangeability of these boxes as a sign that they are not to be cared about, in fact they are deliberately made to be uncared for. They aren’t felt to be alive, merely to occupy space. Campus wallpaper. However, it’s a kind of wallpaper that papers over the authority structures behind planned spaces and hidden controls of public spaces. A managed no-place space that could be anywhere without relation to anyone. This makes some people feel safer; everything is being taken care of with minimal effort.

Children’s playgrounds are similarly made to be not-cared about,  interchangeable.

A garden is made as a place fitting for oneself and where tending is implied.

construction site/inside

done

wheatfield site

done

Garden Site/June

Construction continues around my garden plots. I’ve noticed that the security lights blaze orange at night and that the garden box nearest the security light on one side of the road, and the side of the wheatfield closest to the security light on the other side of the road, are underdeveloped.

participants/collaborators

As this is a thesis project requiring  multiple perspectives, I have been very lucky to engage the attention of two participant/collaborators. I’m calling them able gardener 1 and able gardener 2. I am looking for another able gardener # 3, who will together with myself (principle researcher) make four sides to our container planters. I received notice from the Ethics Review Board today that I can go ahead with the project. As I sat on the edges of the mini wheatfield today chatting with able gardener 2, we noticed the tiny sproutings of hundreds of wheat seeds that were planted on Saturday.

Able Gardeners 1 and 2 are now “categorized”, which means that when they write something they will tag themselves and afterwards all their blog entries will organize themselves so that they can be read as separate streams as well as intertwined contributors to this blog.

Invasion of Wheat

I was quite in despair about the state of growth of my boxes and then as I left, I passed by the infernal petunia boxes, where I had planted the first batch of wheat last monday-  LOOK!  my wheat has come up as weeds!  I am thrilled to note that seeds CAN grow here (perhaps only monocultures).

My new participant/collaborator in this escapelot will be known as “able gardener 1“. There will be another voice, another plotter, another denizen of this space.

Plan B

It’s late for planting wheat and I’m feeling the pressure of bad weather, but after reading a bit more about wheat I thought I might have a chance, even though planting in the “gristley bits” of nature on the borderline of possibility sounds more like “futile” than “possible”.  How can anything grow here, except my own irritation? I planted the tree container I was given after the dreaded petunia invasion of last week. Construction and destruction continue a dusty regime of infiltration. Not to mention the squirrels.

Wheat mini- monoculture/Monday

These were my boxes, planted with wheat seed on Monday. By Wednesday petunias were in full bloom. (see below)

You could call this a detour from the Plan.