NOLA Green Roots Final Post

NOLA Green Roots is the ultimate example of the modern urban gardening movement. They have managed to bring botanical life to some of the seemingly harshest environments. Here is a picture of the Wise Words Garden in Mid-city right next to a new apartment building and right by I-10 as you can see in the other picture. Despite the fact that this lot does not have very deep or rich soil, and is even paved in some spots, the raised box method that this organization uses eliminates that as a problem. Their set up can be used in any location which really opens up opportunities for expansion in an urban environment where it might otherwise be hard to find viable garden land. I think this method really gets to the root (pardon the pun) of the appeal of urban gardening. In an urban setting we are constantly surrounded by a man made environment and our day to day lives seem to bring us further and further from our natural origins.

Eating is one of the basic survival processes required for life, one that we now satisfy with some of the strangest and most controversial solutions in our world. For this reason I think there is a growing desire to become re-acquainted with the process of food that preceded processed food. It is empowering to know not only where your food comes from, but to play a part in growing it. It's so easy to forget that the cereal we pour out of a box or the ready made dinners we pull out of the freezer started off as a seed in a little bit of dirt somewhere. Forgetting this is a very dangerous thing. Today I was talking to someone with a great phobia of bees who once killed a whole swarm with a can of Raid. I was explaining the many instances of disappearing swarms of bees and how worried people were getting that they might go extinct altogether someone standing near by said "so what? Why does that matter?" Before I was able to get over my shock and explain the process of pollination and starvation I realized how dangerous an oversight like this is. If people think that bees are only around to sting us and make our lives miserable then they won't think twice about taking a can of Raid to a swarm of them, but had they some experience in seeing pollination at work they might treat them with the respect they deserve rather than reckless fear.

Here Faith and I work diligently to pull the husks off the pecans we gathered from around the pecan tree on the property. It's easy to forget when you bite into a piece of pecan pie just how far that pecan has come. From a giant tree to the ground in a split husk which must then be removed (at great cost to those of us with delicate fingers) and then you still have to worry about the shell, and after all that you might find that a worm got there first. Pecans are such a Southern tradition and yet I bet that many of us who take pride in our Southern heritage have never had the satisfaction of seeing your fingers raw and red from husking fresh pecans.

This is why what NOLA Green Roots is trying to accomplish is so important, to bring back the ecological connections that we urban dwellers often think we can live without. These gardens are tucked into the back alleys of neighborhoods in hidden spots otherwise forgotten, they don't have much space but their yield is incredible. At Wise Words the chicken house hosts 40 laying hens each laying about an egg a day. It's amazing how much productivity such a little space can have, and yet these chickens still have room to walk around, their beaks are intact, they have several places to roost, access to clean water, and are fed organically. Seeing this makes me even more infuriated about factory farmed eggs where they would have 4 times as many chickens packed in together with no outside area and use mutilation rather than space to control the hens behavior towards one another.

Despite the small size of the gardens, they still require a great deal of attendance and constant attention. Members and volunteers go to the gardens daily to ensure that things are growing smoothly. Here we see some of what makes NOLA Green Roots work, the dedication of volunteers like Rolando and Faith (the one crouching on the ground gathering pecans). This was one of the volunteer days that the organization has for service learners and other volunteers to get the garden in shape for new plantings. On this day volunteers cleared beds and filled them with new dirt so that winter plants could replace the warm weather plantings. It was also time to harvest the dozens of pecans that the tree had dropped.

Although NOLA Green Roots isn't certified organic (a long and extremely expensive process) they do not use any chemical pesticides or fertilizers on their products and they strive to reduce the impact of their project while maximizing use of their resources. One of my favorite examples of this is the rain barrel network they have set up which feeds into their irrigation system. To the right you can see the system in action hydrating a bed of tomatoes. Water that falls on the clear plastic corrugated roof runs into gutters surrounding the roof and then drains into the barrels which have a faucet at the bottom connected to tubes with holes in them running through the bed. Urban gardening affords a wonderful opportunity and requirement for creativity and resourcefulness. Composting is another example of this since it relies on returning waste back to the soil and using it to start fresh. To the left you can see their multi-bin system which is built using old palettes, another example of resourcefulness.

Despite the overall concept of getting back to nature and connecting ecologically to what we put into our bodies, in a way this constructed environment seems almost falser than the actual construction around it. Is it more unnatural to construct an entirely new habitat for ourselves or to manipulate and manufacture a facade of nature with non-native plants in neat rows for us to trim to our will? Although overall I wholeheartedly support this organization and I have loved familiarizing myself with the garden, I do wonder what happened to bring us to this point, and if we will ever get back? Will non-native fruits and vegetables grown in boxes built on top of asphalt always be the closest thing to "naturally sourced food" we urban dwellers know? Will we always look at bees as something to be feared and squished rather than cherished and protected? And will we always marvel at innovations like composting and rain barrels as novelties rather than norms? I hope that one day the answer to these questions will be no, but for now I think we can settle for the advances that NOLA Green Roots has made with their organization and trust that a more "natural" future is ahead of us.