Editor’s note: We are pleased to introduce you to our new weekly gardening columnist, Jen Smith, a farmer and gardener currently working as the manager of the biology greenhouses at Amherst College. Jen co-founded Crimson & Clover Farm in Florence and farmed there for several years before beginning her work at Amherst. She lives in Leeds and can be reached at jenskillmansmith@gmail.com.
As a child, I measured my wealth in the plastic containers of yew berries and cypress cones I had collected, the number of mud pies I had formed and dried and stacked in my outdoor play kitchen and in the pile of sharpened and hollowed sticks I kept to carry with me as I roved the wilds of our neighborhood. I grew up in the heart of Washington, D.C., but I spent most of my childhood outside.
My favorite years-long game was something akin to playing homestead or preparing for the winter. I’m sure I was influenced by the cultural popularity of romanticized stories of white frontier life — “Little House on the Prairie” or the 1989 made-for-TV adaptation of “Caddie Woodlawn” that my sister and I watched until our taped VHS copy wore thin.
However it was that I found myself woven into this game of survival, as a result, I spent hours outside collecting berries, seeds, nuts, bark, moss and any other goods or “food” I could find in order to prepare for winter. And central to these efforts was a place that we called “the gardens.” The gardens spanned the full top third of our residential block, 10 house lots’ worth, turning the corner onto the next block over and bordering the busy four-lane artery that intersected our block and led into downtown D.C. The houses themselves had been torn down to prepare the lot for development, a fate that ended up taking 35 more years to come to fruition. In the interim, it remained wild, open and overgrown — an ideal space for exploration and play. Because of the always-present threat of development, the space had an ephemeral quality to me as a child: I knew that what it held was both special and not long for this world.
While mostly grassy, the gardens had wild edges and remnants of the old houses that had been razed. Concrete stairs rose from the sidewalk leading into the overgrown field, and scattered outlines of old basements and concrete rubble scattered the property. We called this space the gardens because when I was very young, it was the site of an impromptu community garden for our neighbors, originally organized by a coalition of gardeners but eventually turned over to squatters and neighbors who tended small plots of raised beds and lightly landscaped the rutted field. By the time I was old enough to walk up and play there on my own, the organized gardens had long been abandoned, with only the remnants of scattered raised beds and a few remaining benches under the shade trees that lined the lot.
Tiny wild strawberries grew near the viney shrub border of the gardens, and I spent hours in the warm early summer sun crouched in the grass collecting these berries for my homesteading game. I didn’t know at the time that the berries were actually edible; my interests were in bringing them home to smash into a paste that I would let dry out into a kind of fruit leather to save for winter. When I got it in my head that it was important for me to learn to “hunt,” I wove through the shrubby tree border on the interior of the lot looking for tall and hefty sticks to shape into spears — I would buff the tops into rough-hewn points with rocks and on the sidewalk. I then stood for hours in the shaded corner of the gardens teaching myself to throw them evenly, so they would sink firmly into the soil when they landed. This space of the gardens for me — this wild in-between, the intersection of development and nature, of the city itself and the land on which it was built — this is where I felt the most myself, the most in tune with the wild of my neighborhood, and the most free.
As an adult who has now spent most of my professional life cultivating plants in many forms — on farms, in gardens and in greenhouses — I am still drawn to these spaces of the wild in-between. They are all around us, in abandoned lots, on the edges of the bike path, in the overgrown back corners of our gardens and yards. As an adult, learning to farm and garden and cultivate plants has taught me a lot about order; I now know the names of the plants I work with, I know their nutritional and light needs, I know how to think ahead about when plants will flower and fruit and how large or small they will be and what colors they will display. I love knowing plants in this new way, and I love that there is always more to learn. But continuing to return to the spaces of the wild in-between is always a reminder to me that there is treasure and mystery just outside the cultivated garden or mind.
I am so excited to write for this weekly gardening column in the Gazette. I hope to bring a bit of order and a bit of wild in exploring all of the ways we relate to and learn about plants, growing and gardening. Next week, I will introduce myself a bit more through my own farming and gardening history, but I wanted to begin where it all began for me, in the gardens.
Did you have a space like the gardens where you spent time as a child, or do you have one in your life today? What does this place mean to you? I would love to hear from you, so please be in touch.
Winter farmers markets are back up and running for the season and are a great source for local vegetables, fruit, cheese, meat, maple products, breads and more.
The Northampton Winter Farmers Market is every Saturday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., through April 18 at the Northampton Senior Center, located at 67 Conz St., Northampton.
The Winter Farmers Market at the Hampshire Mall is every Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., through March 21, located at 376 Russell St., Hadley.
The Springfield Winter Farmers Market is 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the second and third Saturdays in December, and the second and fourth Saturdays every month after that through April at the Shea Building in Forest Park, Springfield. Enter at the main entrance on Sumner Avenue, then follow signs into the park for the market.
The Greenfield Winter Farmers Market is every first Saturday of the month, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. through March, at The Discovery School at Four Corners, located at 21 Ferrante Ave., Greenfield.