A letter to Mayor Colombi.
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Dear Mayor Colombi,
A thousand thank yous for your continuing support of our Crows Woods gardens.
We gardeners are already harvesting bumper crops – with our “help-yourself table” regularly humped with monster zucchini. My garden neighbor, Paul Eckman, and our web page editor, Mauricio Suarez, already boast 10-foot tall corn! No exaggeration there.
Bless my soul, an hour ago I lugged home a ripe tomato, Swiss chard, cucumbers, zucchini, yellow squash, green beans, one pepper, two onions, and a fistful of zinnias and purple cone flowers. I could have brought home ripe eggplants, but I forgot my scissors that make it easier to cut down the fruit. So for lunch I invented an open-faced Swiss chard/onion/red pepper sandwich made with egg and Parmesan cheese. (I’m always inventing new recipes.) Oh, yes, and I ate the fresh green beans. Last week I made and froze a huge batch of pesto made from my rioting basil plants. I haven’t yet had time to harvest what appears to be a bumper crop of potatoes.
By the way, you should see the shoulder-tall tomato plants and the reach-for-the-sky sunflowers in former Commissioner John Reisner’s plot. John’s one of my garden neighbors. Alas, the squash borer took out John’s zucchini.
I think this is our best year yet in the gardens. None of this would be possible without your continuing support. When our gardens moved to this site, we could hardly find an earthwork. Now the earthworms regularly convene dance parties. Of course, we feed them. I dig into my plot almost all my fruit and vegetable waste – summer and winter – and shredded leaves. After Halloween and Thanksgiving last fall, I lugged in 15 bales of hay that I begged from co-operative householders around town. In the fall I’m always on the lookout for bales of hay on my 3-mile morning walk. Everyone seems happy to let me recycle their hay. The earthworms love it. The weeds hate it.
Please come and visit our gardens. I want you to see with your own eyes what you have helped us create. If you send me an-e-mail to let me know when you’re coming, I’ll bring my camera and take a picture of you—pose you maybe next to the 10-foot-high corn – a picture for your refrigerator or for your scrapbook of your accomplishments in serving over 80 very happy gardeners.
I’d write a letter-to-the-editor about all this happiness in our gardens, but it might invite tomato and zucchini-snatchers. Yes, thieves do poach in our plots.
By the way, we do have a waiting list -- folks hoping that someone will hate weeding, get sun stroke, or move away.
Everlastingly thankful, I am
Mary Previte, plot # 21
