One of my favorite places in Wilmington is a train trestle that bridges a tidal creek, specifically Burnt Mill Creek, near my house. My profile picture is of me and Kristin throwing rocks off the bridge. The trestle is only a short walk or bike ride from my house, so I end up there fairly often. It is a great foraging area most times of the year, and I went out today expecting to find something good. However, I got sidetracked and ended up exploring instead of foraging.

Under and around the train trestle are a series of above ground waste water pipes, pushing storm water and human “waste” from downtown and the surrounding area out to the Northside water treatment plant. I have walked on several of the pipes over the years, ending up in all kinds of interesting places. One of the pipes ends up behind the back lot of Screen Gems studios where you can see the prop buildings and various other crap from the movie and television industries. Another pipe weaves around the backyards of homes and businesses. Another goes to a small, but fairly often used homeless camp.

Today, since the tide was low, I was able to hop on one of the pipes that I had not followed very far in previous explorations.

My intent on these walks is to not have an intent. Walk the pipe and see what happens. I basically walked until the vegetation growing around the pipe grew too thick and I couldn’t get by. Again, since the tide was low I jumped to the side and got to some dry high ground.

The edge of an estuary is the perfect habitat for the cottonmouth, the high grass able to hide those venomous little pricks of misery. I saw one about six years ago near the train trestle, but that was the first and last time I had seen any type of snake out there. This trip was no exception; just a few birds and the widely scattered remains of a deer.

Also scattered all over the place were various plastic flowers and ribbons, scattered into the grass never to decompose, only fade in the bleaching sun. They joined the hundreds of plastic soda bottles and aluminum cans, deflated basketballs and Frisbees floating in the estuary and piled on the ground.

I came to a gravel trail that seemed pretty well traveled by vehicle and feet. With the brightly colored potato chip bags scattered about, barely touched by the sun, and the fresh boot tracks in a somewhat dried mud puddle, I figured folks came back here all the time.

Back here, everything is kudzu heaped over dying trees, the vines themselves browning after the first frost. In the summer the kudzu piles become mountains, climbing and killing everything. The vines’ march is stopped only by the estuary. If kudzu could grow on water it would.

The kudzu opened up and I stumbled upon a discarded pile of those grave side stands that hold funeral flower wreaths. After finding a few more pieces of evidence and getting my bearings, I figured out that I had ended up behind Oakdale Cemetery.

I followed the path more, passed a dozen piles of chopped up trees, pallets and freshly dug dirt. I guess it makes sense that the unused dirt from a grave has to go somewhere. Might as well be in a pile that will eventually be colonized by kudzu. The path finally ended behind a chain link fence. The loosely locked gate had my favorite sign attached…

The view through the fence wasn’t that inviting, so I decided not to jump it. The cemetery is several hundred acres, a place I could easily explore using the front gate. The one time I actually went in, the guy at the gate gave me a map since it is pretty easy to get lost in the labyrinth. I didn’t make it far that time, but if they allowed bicycles I might consider another try.

At the gate I turned around and headed back home. Well, headed back home after throwing a couple hundred rocks from the train trestle. The other things of note for the exploration were a rope swing near a waste water pipe…

a thick stand of river cane…

and a plant in the mint family that I haven’t figured out yet.

It smelled like mint, but a bit “gamey”. It wasn’t catmint, and it wasn’t wild mint. I did find wild mint (Mentha arvensis) nearby. The closest picture I can find online is for apple mint. I couldn’t smell any apple. Anyone know what this plant is?

The third and finally stop on the farm tour was the dual urban gardens of Durham Inner City Gardeners (DIG) and Southeastern Efforts Developing Sustainable Spaces (SEEDS). The DIG program is youth oriented and works 1/2 acre of land. They sell the resulting produce at the Durham Farmers Market. The kids in the program are paid a stipend for their work as they plant, tend, harvest and attend their table at the market. DIG currently employs twelve Durham youth in its program.

SEEDS has youth programs but is also community oriented with community garden plots, teaching facilities and after school programs. SEEDS has 1 1/2 acres in mixed perennials and annuals as well as fruit trees, large compost facilities, two greenhouses and an outdoor classroom.

The DIG garden is about as urban as it can get without being situated in raised beds on a loading dock somewhere. Nestled near factories and train tracks, the noise of the city was never very far away. There was also the constant reality of “poaching”, which has the potential to ruin a kid’s experience with the garden if the particular crop they had started from seed became the target of theft. While not unique to cities (I never paid for sweet corn, peas, cabbage, onions or pumpkins when I was a kid in the country), it presents a unique problem when working in a non-profit, youth oriented setting. Stealing from acres upon acres of row crops is one thing, but taking all the peppers from a twelve foot row is completely different.

Like the garden’s coordinators, I would turn a blind eye to the occasional person jumping the fence to get some needed food. Sometimes folks have to steal food; as an adult I understand the concept. I might even be the one jumping the fence someday, but I would find it hard to explain it to a ten year old if they happened to catch me in the act of digging up their only row of sweet potatoes. The question that the coordinators are wrestling with at the moment – how to encourage the fence jumpers to get involved in the garden? Anyway, that is a long aside…

Through many years of soil work, composting and mulching, the garden beds have become very fertile. The okra plants in this picture are actually ten to twelve feet high, something I had never seen before. The bases of the plants were several inches around and looked like tree trunks on some of the larger plants.

To maximize space, the DIG garden incorporates some terrace beds where there used to be a steep slope.

A further indicator of the care they give their soil, this chard should have been dead in the summer yet it keeps on producing. The DIG folks have harvested this chard every week since mid-March. The stem bases of these plants were several inches around indicating a constant harvest and constant new growth.

On the other side of the street is the larger SEEDS space with its greenhouses, cold frames and education facilities. The gardeners use burlap coffee bags from a local organic roaster as mulch. The bags break down after a few months.

The outline of the garden is covered in perennials, mostly herbs and fruit trees. The cardoon pictured below was part of a wormwood and rosemary area.

Community members also tend to mushroom logs in a back corner of the garden.

I had visited SEEDS a few years ago under different circumstances. I was helping Kristin corral a few kids from Wilmington’s Community Boys and Girls Club. The kids were on my last nerve towards the end of the visit. They were more interested in picking unripe strawberries, making strange comments and laughing uncontrollably as our guide pointed out the Pussy Willows in the landscape. The garden has changed a lot since that visit and seemed to be more bountiful with more community garden beds and more compost bins integrated into the areas where they would be easiest to reach. The SEEDS project is set to take on another five acres elsewhere in Durham, which will extend its education possibilities as well as well get more kids involved in working on a small farm.

The second stop on the farm tour was the Anathoth Community Garden in Cedar Grove, NC, a rural town of less than 1,000 people. Following the murder of a town member a few years ago, the community got together to heal. This community garden project came out of that healing process. Sitting on five donated acres, this project of the Cedar Grove Methodist Church brings together eighty members of the area to farm together.

Rather than renting out plots, this garden truly brings the community into “community garden”. Folks work side by side over the entire 1 1/2 acres of current cultivation and share in all of the produce that comes out of the area. Membership is a mere $10 per year and requires two hours of work per week in order to get a share of produce. Member potlucks are held at least once a week after a day’s work.

The variety of cold weather crops was pretty amazing as was the actual garden bed construction. The farm employs the biointensive methods outlined by John Jeavons in his book “How to Grow More Vegetables“. The basic theory is that the deeper, more nutritious and well watered the soil is, the more plants it can sustain per square foot. A healthy soil eliminates the need for the plants to compete for nutrients and more calories can be harvested from less space.

The farm also uses raised beds dug to a depth of at least 18 inches with some beds dug 24 inches deep. Heavy mulches, rotation and use of farm made compost contribute to the bounty of the small farm.

Here is first year asparagus -

Broccoli ready for the first cut -

Brussels sprouts -

The farm’s new off-grid greenhouse -

A sweet looking bibb lettuce variety -

For irrigation the farm uses drip tape, which is a great way of reducing evaporation by getting the water to the soil surface one drip at a time. The result is a penetrating soak that uses much less water than overhead irrigation and gives a deeper watering. Usually this irrigation method is used with mulch for maximum benefit.

For cool season extension, the farm uses floating row covers. Underneath this cover was a variety of head lettuce as well as tatsoi, bok choi, pak choi and mustard.

The Anathoth garden is able to feed many more than its eighty members. It also delivers food to the elderly, to food banks and other community members. Overall I felt this was an extremely well functioning community garden, pulling a great member base in a low population rural area.

Last Friday, as part of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association’s annual Sustainable Agriculture Conference, I went on a farm tour focused on how agriculture and community can come together. There were three sites on the tour. This post deals with the first stop, Duke Forest Ecovillage.

Consisting of 36 acres and twelve homesites, this community presents a somewhat unique development model. The requirements for the homes are fairly strict in that they must meet certain energy efficiency requirements and be almost completely solar powered.

Another interesting part of the development is the small farm component. Together with the homes, the developer is also building a three acre market farm to serve the community and also to sell at markets outside of the community. A full time farmer will live in the development and respond to the communities food needs.

Currently there is only one home built. The developer, Allan Rosen, lives here and directs the project on site. If you are thinking this is a great idea for a community, you might be right. Current development models are very devastating from an ecological perspective, and this seems to offer a very strong alternative. However, simply from a price perspective, this project is about as bourgeois as a farm can get. With a two acre home site going for $140,000 and a solar home price tag of $300,000 to $400,000, you would have to be in it for the ambiance and not the politics. Don’t get me wrong. This is a great model, but it is geared towards the upper middle class and is not affordable for most of us.

The farm is divided into several 1/2 acre tracts. The above picture is two of those tracts. Tony Kleese (former CFSA executive director), the farm consultant on this project, has worked to greatly improve what started out as very poor soil. To give an example, Tony has brought the pH up from an average of 4.1 to 6.1. That is a manageable pH if the organic matter content is also increased. The cation exchange capacity, a measure of how readily available the soil nutrition is to the plant, has been increased on average from 2.5 to 10 with the goal of getting all the plots over 10. Calcium was improved from 13 to 70 with a goal of 65. It goes on and on from there. This was in a period over a little over a year.

The future orchard is 1/8 of an acre.

One good thing about the scale of this farm is that there is no need for a full sized tractor. All of the land can be maintained with walk-behind gas/diesel powered tools.

This isn’t a development that I could ever see myself living in. It would have to be a totally different structure. If the lots were $5,000, the biggest house you could build was 1000 square feet, and the farm was run by all the inhabitants, then maybe I could get behind it. As this development stands, it still has a separation of the food growing process from the producer and the consumer. Yes, the farm is in the community but the community is not participating in that farm other than financially.