This afternoon, I’ll be going to the Laguardia Community Garden (LCG) to help build a trellis to grow snap peas—apparently an early season crop. I’ll be building it with my new friend Mayer Vishner on whose 10 foot by 15 foot plot I am going to be a sort of share cropper.
To grow your own vegetables in New York City, if you are an apartment dweller like me, you need to have a garden plot.
Garden plots are quite common in Europe. There, land for plots is set aside because it makes people happy to garden in their cities. Here, where we worship no gods before market economics, land is just too expensive to waste on plant-loving hippies with too much time on their hands.
What community gardens there are in New York tend to be on land where torn-down derelict buildings once stood and green-thumbed squatters have moved in to plant flowers and tomatoes. Many of New York’s community gardens are under threat because the land is worth more if a developer puts more cement and concrete on it, so the city, which owns most of the gardened land parcels, reserves the right to sell.
As a result, it’s hard to get a garden plot in New York. I called LCG and the waiting list is four years. I did, however, because I had an old phone number, meet Mayer, who is the garden’s former secretary. He’s a 60-year-old or so character who told me on the phone that “what hair I have left is down to my shoulders.”
Mayer has been gardening in the City for 30 years. From some of his biggest and juiciest of crops he collects his own seeds and plants them the next year. He has essentially developed his own strain of some vegetables. Anyway, he told me he would be glad to have a partner on his plot, and it is with him that I will be building the trellis.
I just want to say that this goes to the plusses of this project. I’ve rushed around my whole life listening to iPods while traveling, talking on my cell phone while shopping—always trying to do two things at once–but No Impact Man is forcing me to turn my whole life upside down.
Growing snap peas instead of buying them in the supermarket is about the most inefficient thing I’ve ever done. I’m not saying that I’ll take the stairs instead of the elevator or ride my bike instead of the subway for the rest of my life. I don’t know. But for now, I am totally digging–pun completely intended–the “inefficiency” that comes from a left-over hippie teaching me to grow my own food.