LOCALnews
Mid-Atlantic Urban Agriculture Summit 2021 By Charlotte Benedetto, Charlotte Crook, and Melinda Thompson The 2021 Mid-Atlantic Urban Agriculture Summit gave urban gardeners and farmers advice, information, and encouragement. The virtual event, organized by Virginia Cooperative Extension, lasted three days in mid-October. The event had a solid turnout, with plenty of people on the Zoom call for each keynote speaker, Q&A session, and breakout room.
Growing Medicine
Tuesday, October 12, the first day of the conference, featured herbs, soils, and the expenses of growing versus purchasing food. The second day of the conference, Wednesday, October 13, had events on combating garden diseases, growing Egyptian Spinach, and mulch application. That Thursday, the conference’s final day, featured a gardening and farmers’ market community organization, virtual farm tour, and final evaluation for the summit. “A Box or Two with Medicine,” the Mid-Atlantic Urban Agriculture Summit session led by Henriette den Ouden, explored the subtleties of community herb gardening. Often, the central passion for growing a garden is the fresh taste: ”Taste is really such an individual thing,” den Ouden said. “You can have the most interesting conversations with people, and it’s just about ‘Is it bitter? Is it sweet?’ . . . They are in the now. They are tasting. They become very aware of what they’re doing. It’s fun to hear one teenager say that elderberry tastes like ketchup and the other thinks that the elderberry are tasting kind of bitter.” DC-area gardeners cultivate and grow in the haze of our complex local political backdrop, and den Ouden articulated how working with herbs in a place of mindfulness and presence re-centers a ragged psyche. “Pick a flower, put it in water for 24 hours. Bam! There you have your flower essence,” she said. “It’s a really nice way of connecting with nature. Connect6
WASHINGTON GARDENER
NOVEMBER 2021
ing with flowers. And it’s a nice way of feeling stillness in your garden—no matter where your garden is.” Urban gardens can have debilitating industrial hangovers, and den Ouden reminded us of the limits of these sites, saying, “If there’s been a lot of environmental pollution, you don’t want to have your herbs in there because they take up whatever is in the ground. If there are heavy metals in the soil, don’t even think about growing medicine in it!” Do authors of northerly herbals just not understand the Mid-Atlantic’s climatological temperament? “Herbals are often written far up north . . . so even if the herbal says put them in full sun, put them in a little bit of shade,” said den Ouden. Like people, herbs need “personal space” and “constant airflow.” “It’s important that they look healthy and that they are healthy, which also means keeping a little distance between them.” Timely advice. A little space; a little coolness; and rich, clean soil is a must for both herbs and shared healing and connection in the garden.
Starting with Soils
To be a gardener means to be “All About the Soil,” but to many of us, despite our interest, the scientific aspects of soils may be a bit occult, obscure, and hard to understand. “Soil science can be complicated . . . soil maintenance doesn’t need to be,” Kirsten Conrad said in her contribution to the Urban Agriculture Summit. Garden enthusiasts can better understand soils by comparing “abstract, unseeable concepts to known objects and functions [to] make them as ‘seeable’ as possible,” said Conrad. “So, if the sand particle is the size of a basketball, what’s the size of a silt particle? Maybe a golf ball?” Handling the soil is understanding the soil, and is “where you start, when you start to improve soil,” she said. Conrad advocates for educators and gardeners alike to try traditional, tactile, hands-
in-the-dirt techniques like ribbon tests, sediment jars, and balls of soil. Make a mud ball and play with it to detect what Conrad calls tilth: a “good old-fashioned word meaning ‘workability.’” We can’t over-emphasize the importance of soil microorganisms and feeding them with organic matter to grow and remediate the soil “peds.” [Peds are small clumps or aggregates held together by the electrical charges on the surfaces of the minerals.] But it’s also our job as urban gardeners to restore washed-out, salted-up nutrients, and organic matter. Conrad’s case study featured a highly doable method of soil rebuilding—years and years of layering airy drifts of highnitrogen wood chips and little else. “Healthy soil is a loose soil. . . you should be able to push your arm down into the soil up to the elbow,” Conrad said. Compacted soil “pans,” and/or poorly draining clay soils are a challenge no doubt familiar to many local gardeners. Urban and suburban soils can be miserably imporous, impermeable, and compacted. It doesn’t help that poor drainage is a native characteristic of our Beltway-adjacent high-clay soils. Conrad’s case-study site also had drainage issues—impermeable clay with low “kettles” that filled with runoff regularly. It also had wood chips—about 18 inches of chips applied to the site yearly. After six years, the soil was loosened enough to broad-fork. Plants took off in the restored, fluffy soil formed from degraded wood chips. “We need plants and organic matter to help build soil and temper the extremes of flood-drought cycles,” she said. Truly essential wisdom for our ever-more sun-baked, washed-out, and flooded gardens.
Myth of the $100 Salad
Is it really more expensive to eat healthy? Does our beloved homegrown produce actually cost us more? Don’t bring that up in polite company, or you may find yourself banished to the garden next time. In his economic exegesis on indoor solutions to food-supply resilience, Tyler Baras crunched the numbers for us, and the answer is: (fanfare) It depends.
