It is yet another wet and cool Saturday morning in this beautiful city of Cleveland, Ohio. There is something so pleasant about getting up early on a weekend morning whilst most of the city sleeps off the festivities of the night before, heading out to the West Side Market for some fresh veggies and incredible pastries and the pierogis from Pierogi Palace are AMAZING and a sure cure for "what ails ya". Of course if I started listing all the vendors that stand out in my mind we would be stuck here forever, however I will take the time to mention The Basketeria for their organic veggie selection and really nice people, Iskander Produce because the gentleman there is always so very friendly and Sam's because that gentleman (whom I assume is named Sam) will tell you not only what all the fun stuff at his stand is, but how to prepare it and what to prepare it with. I always get the best peppers for salsa and chili there.
This of course sort of ties into the theme for the day which will be urban gardening. I know I skimped on mentioning anything about the Burning River Fest as a sort of review but that is because there was so very much to go over, so very many photos (I will have to use the Flickr thing I suppose) and it would require an incredible amount of time that I instead used to get a new job.
Urban gardening fascinates me. I suppose it started with the whole affection my mother and father instilled in me for gardening, getting my hands all dirty and watching things grow and developed when I moved into a house and had plans of redesigning the yard into a glorious garden that would be beautiful and feed my roomates and I. However, I was quick to discover that replanting an entire yard that was overgrown, with limited resources and with very little free time was very impractical. Instead, I built windowboxes to hang from the west windows (we got a new cat that loves to dig up my plants so I had to put the new stuff out of reach) and started with some peppers, roma tomatoes, chard, onions, etc as well as a large herb box in my bedroom. The bedroom herb box is a wonderful idea. If you love the smell of rosemary and basil and the smell the ground gets right after it rains you will love spritzing the plants and soil in your herb box.
So there I was, starting all these plants in March, I also purchased some hops online to grow in the backyard because we brew our own beer and the thought of using our own hops in own beer really delighted me. When it came time to transplant these crops to the yard I got VERY excited, we were going to have all these plants, in the front yard, in the garden area that not only would look nice, but would feed us with fresh, organic, delicious vegetables. Oh how my heart soared at the prospect.
Long story short, the herb box didn't survice a surprise attack by that nasty cat and my roomate accidently poisoned the plants I was about to transplant into the front yard when he stripped the paint off the porch to repaint it. All I have left are the peppers and hops (which are on my mother's farm).
Even with these setbacks I haven't lost faith. The prospect of using your yard as a place to produce food locally seems logical enough, but what about all the green space in vacant lots around town or on property that local businesses have to pay to maintain, what if they allowed a third party to use the property for gardening? Makes sense eh? Seems pretty damn obvious actually.
Enter a whole muss of agencies that not only farm the land, but do so as an educational tool for urban kids (oh man, the benefits of this are staggering!) who farm the land, sell the food to local restaurants such as Lucky's Cafe and to private individuals at special markets. The Urban Learning Garden/Cleveland City Fresh (who was at Burning River Fest) in particular is part of the New Agrarian Center. I just love when all this sort of stuff comes together. Get the kids outside in the dirt so that they build up natural immune systems to asthma, etc, and get some sunlight, teach them how to grow and how good vegetables are, allow it to generate income to sustain itself, cooperate with local businesses to provide locally grown food AND relieve their cost of keeping up their property by actually putting it to use, interact with the community and create bonds that cross all ages, build a sense of pride and ownership, create life on the street as well as points of interest that stimulate local economies, there are too many to list and you can understand how interconnected this all is.
It makes me genuinely happy to see this sort of thing going on. You should be too, so get off your butts and get involved.
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