Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow Read Online Free PDF Page B

gardener desperation. I could offer to rent their beds from them, or share what I grew. There had to be something that could be done.
    I pondered my plan for a few days, until I woke up on a Saturday to the sound of digging. I ran out on the balcony and saw a man wearing a straw hat spading up the beds I had dreamed of working myself. As the day went by, I watched him weed and plant and do all the things I wanted to do.
    I moped for a week or two, looking balefully at my small gardening area. It seemed such a disappointment after I’d envisioned flat land and full sun. What had given me great happiness the summer before, what had seemed like such an upgrade over my crooked window boxes in San Francisco, no longer satisfied me. I wanted more.
    Something needed to be done.
    The year before I had taken myself on a tour of the P-Patches. There was a waiting list for plots, and I’d wanted to apply early, to be ready. Before I sent in my application, I decided to survey the scene.
    There was a steep bit of hillside on Phinney Ridge, with a view of snowcapped mountains, that had been terraced into cascading garden beds—I could only imagine the work it had taken to build on such a slope. There was a sunny plot attached to a pocket park near Green Lake, and a tidy spot in Ballard that featured a demonstration garden. I took my toddler niece with me on that last visit. We looked curiously at ruby-colored stalks of rainbow chard and the lacy fronds of carrots.
    The garden I liked the best, however, the one I could imagine myself part of, was the original Picardo Farm in the northeast section of the city. It was large—more than two hundred plots. The year-round gardens featured berry bushes, grape trellises, and other perennial plantings. The summer plots offered a seasonal lease, after which time the gardens were dismantled,plowed, and sown with a cover crop to enrich the soil. Because of the size, I assumed it would have a decent turnover. In the smaller gardens, I suspected that someone would need to move away or die before you could get a plot.
    In the midst of my garden frustration, a postcard arrived welcoming me as a new member of the P-Patch program, assigned to Picardo Farm. My planning had paid off.
    One Saturday in April I attended the orientation for new gardeners. I looked curiously at my fellow newbies: families with small children, a few older folks, some young. Though we spanned the age range and a few ethnicities, everyone had the hearty look of a Seattleite, dressed in rain slickers and fleece. I wondered about the other thing we all shared—whatever mysterious thing made us want to grow food.
    There were other people at the orientation, returning gardeners who had been at Picardo for years. There were benches dedicated in memory of gardeners who had passed on. I’d heard of three Picardo marriages: relationships that had started over a row of peas or chard. I was charmed by a place where such things might happen. I was still new to Seattle, still trying to find where I might fit in, still deciding if this was my place. A garden seemed like a good spot to find community, or to grow it.
    What was harder to find that first day was my Picardo plot. I stood on the sidewalk overlooking the farm and tried to align the map I had been given with the grid in the garden below. Picardo Farm was set below street level and took up the better part of a block. I wondered if people driving by had any idea of the small garden city down below.
    The side of the garden that held the seasonal plots looked like a gold rush boomtown that April morning. String and poles measured out paths on bare earth: Here were the trails. Here were the garden plots. This was your land to tend. We all had a claim to stake that early-spring day.
    Returning gardeners were already at work, building trellises,marking paths. Some of the more ambitious had decorated with flags or banners—though this might have been to help them find their plots again in