snapdragons, zinnias, tomatoes and beans

I love to garden. Alas, I have no garden to garden.

My building has a rooftop garden, comprised of tubs. It is supposed to be run by the residents but, somehow, funded by the building's owner nonprofit or the property management company. No one wants to fund plants and plants, or even seeds, cost something. And tools cost something. Compost is free from Berkeley Parks but it has to be hauled.

How does a group of disparate neighbors, literally from cultures across the globe, decide what to grow? And what to do about unsupervised children who think it is fun to pluck green tomato buds and throw them off the roof just because it is fun to throw things and, I guess, imagine they might land on a person and unsettle the person?

One year, several years ago, I personally bought about 18 tomato plants. I reasoned that if I tended that many plants, including paying for food specifically for organic tomatoes plus hauling compost from the park service, that I might be able to enjoy just one or two home grown perfectly ripe tomatoes.

But a gal who lived in the building stalked the roof. As soon as any tomato, always still green, got bigger than a grape, she would harvest them for herself and her kids. All of us on the garden committee pleaded with her to let the tomatoes at least get ripe. We did not invite the whole building to feel free to take whatever they wanted, we pointed out. She was not free to just take them. She said if we were chumps and wanted to plant tomatoes in the open, she was going to take them. She did not seem to grasp our argument that she was plucking them before they were fully grown.

I finally reduced myself to begging, tearfully. I explained that I had bought 18 plants, already started to maximize the growing sesaon, i.e. to get more tomatoes. I explained I had bought special tomato planta foot, watered the tomatoes, and everything else growing in the garden (I also planted lots of beans, lettuce and spinach, and other things). I said "If you could just let me have one tomato out of the eighteen plants, I can accept tha tyou are going to take all the rest."

Laughing at me, looking at me askance with open scorn, she said "If you dumb enough to put your money into public plants, you aren't going to get any tomatoes. You have been stupid. It's not my fault."

I told her "You are not going to take any more of my tomatoes." She said "Try and stop me."

I tripped out all my tomato plants, leaving behind the two plants someone else had planted. I don't know if that stealing tomato woman stole any more tomatoes but she didn't steal any more of mine.

It wasn't like my 18 plants were going to get many tomatoes. Little boys, who are not supposed to be on the roof at all unless accompanied by an adult, loved to tear off the tiniest green buds of tomato and throw them off the side of the roof. For fun. The boys were wholly oblivious to the fact that they were stealing and damaging someone's effort and with no parents supervising them, as our leases require, there was no way to stop the boys. Management claimed, in written letters to parents, that households that allowed unsupervised minors on the roof would be evicted. Just imagine how easy a little kid could scoot over the not-high fence that lines the roof and fall to their death. How could a sane, reasonsible parent let their kids up on the roof? So okay, ten year olds aren't goingi to thoughtlessly jump but I have seen four year olds crawling on that fence. And the ten year olds destroyed most of my tomatoes. Any tomatoes that didn't get thrown over the side, that woman harvested before they were ripe.

"I just want one home-grown, vine-riened tomato from my 18 plants," I told her several times. "You can have all the rest." But, as I wrote above, she mocked my stupidity. "If you dumb enough to plant for me, I am going to take what you grow."  We had more exchanges.

I stopped gardening after I ripped out the tomatoe plants. If I wasn'at going toi be allowed one red tomato, I was not going to grow anymore for that selfish bitch. And she had three kids, setting examples for them, telling them in actions that it is okay to steal and okay to treat neighbors like dogshit on their shoes.

Since I withdrew from the garden group, other neighbors stepped in. New residents. One guy, clearly mentally ill (some of the units are set aside specifically for mentally ill, formerly homeless patients and he was definitely one of these residents!), he announced that the two year old persimmon trees, which, in two years, had, thus far, only yielded one persimmon, needed deep pruning. They were baby trees when bought. The buildilng did not invest in expensive, mature persimmon trees. How could two year old baby trees need pruning. He 'pruned off pretty much the whole tree but the central stalk. It remains to be seen if those trees will ever grow anything now. That guy was banned from gardening. He ruined some other things.

I go up there once in awhile, to see if there is any food I might like to pick. At least pluck some herbs. But whoever is doing the gardening makes such odd choices. No one has dared to plant a single tomato since that first year's debacle.  We could grow tomatoes up there if management would support the lease that forbids children under 18 up there alone. And get this:   the kids throwing food, like those tomatoes, over the wall, are caught on the security camera. Management has no excuse not to enforce the lease rules:  evict one family for not supervising minors on the roof, for damaging people's hard-worked food crop and kids would stop destroying food on the roof.

I had plantd beans all along the fence. Since I withdrew, they plant lots of beans, which can grow fast and grow prolifically so they are fun to grow for a big building, but no one, not one bean plant, has been planted along the fence since the days when I did it. Explailn that to me?  Why not use the fence?  When I used the fence, the fence was covered with bean vines and beans.

What else do they plant? two eggplant plants for 97 apartments? 

I tried to plant things tha would grow easily in quantity so every household could have some fresh vegetables from the roof. 18 tomato plants was just a start.

I also had started growing lettuce in the many more shallow growing tubs up there but now, those shallow tubs are full of scrawny flwoers that never bloom, are rarely green. We could grow enough lettuce in all those shallow tubs to give heads of lettuce to every apartment a couple times a month. Instead, they grow ground cover. Huh? Why that choice?

And herbs? Why don't we have a herb garden? That first year, when we met as a committee and decided as a group, we planned to have herbs growing year round. We could grow a ton of herbs in just one of the large aluminium watering tubs (these tubs were originally designed to feed large farm animals and are adapted for gardens). One tub could grow enough basil, chilis, parsley, cilantro, apazote and more, and enough for the whole building. But they don't.

A new friend in the building first tried to coax me back to the garden group. A few weeks later, I ventured up on the roof because some children had gotten past the locked gates and were running around a part of the roof with no fencing along the wall. Nothing to shield children, or adults, from falling six stories down. I saw them from my top floor apartment and went up to check out the situation before calling management. But this new friend had already gotten the manager, the children were ousted from the unsafe part of the roof. A janitor had left a gate unlocked to have an illegal smoke on our roof It is illegal to smoke anywhere on the roof because in Berkerley it is illegal to ever smoke with 25 feet of a residential window. Up on our roof, there are residential windows from the top residential floor within a few feet of anywhere on the roof:  so it is illegal to smoke up there, even if you are a janitor.  The janitor felt sheepish, seeing that leaving the gate unlocked had prompted those kids to go exploring. I understand the urge to explore. The photovoltaic panels are over where the kids were. When I first saw them out there, I hoped they were supervised and with a class about photvoltaics. But, nope, they were just kids from the building tempted into forbidden territory. No one fell off the roof but it would not take much.

Anyway, that day my new friend reported to me that maangement had turned off the water on the roof. New management.  I guess they felt they had to show improved budgets by using less water.

Ahem. You cannot grow vegetables in an area experiencing drought without watering the plants. The lemon trees will not grow lemons without wtaer. The orange tree will not grow oranges. And the persimmons, if the pruning fool did not kill them, will not grow persimmons without water. So my new friend had also given up on the garden.

"I couldn't stand all the bullshit" I said. "what is this you say, 'bull sheet'?" Her first langauge is Farsi so I explained that bull shit was shit from a male cow or cattle. I am not clear on exactly what a bull is other than it is male, right? Bullshit to turn off water.

We had the water protected from kids. Only members of th garden group had access to the spigot, which was locked away with a code. Kids would like to go up on the roof and spray one another with water on warm days but they coudln't, not when the spigot was kept locked. But now, the gardeneers have to find staff, which is often unavaialble. Our property managers ahve more meetings than any other organization ever, I have concluded. They post hours from 9 to 5 weekdays but I don't think actual humans are in the office more than four hours a week. And if they are having a meeting, they arent going to give you access to water on the roof.

Does it really improve how a property maaner loos to her boss if she reduces water usage so much that the garden dies?

The garden tubs all have water hoses right inside them. Our first property manager, also to save money, turned all of them off. When the building opened, the rooftop was beautifully landscaped with flowers intended to attracted butterflies and bees to pollinate our vegie tubs but when the water got turned off, all the landscaping on the roof died. All of it.

That was two managers ago. No history gets passed down. and these new property managers are kids. TWenty two? If older than 22, not by much. And wherever they went to college, they did not get trained to think very well. What educated intelligent person, even if they grew up in a very rough urban environment and never grew a plant, who doesn't know that plants need water?

If I had a garden, the first things I would plant would be snapdragons, zinnias tomatoes and beans. and then an herb garden. and Lettuce.kale, collard greens and chard. These all grow easily with compost, sun and WATER. Most imortant to me:  snapdragons and zinnias.

I like yellow snapdragons and pinky-yellow ones. and I like all colors of zinnias. I am not actually all that crazy about zinnias but they make nice cut flowers so I can have cut flowers on my table all summer.

Not here.

Maybe I will meet a man who will fall in love, own a garden and share it with me. That's the only way I'm ever going to get to garden again. I have been on wait ist for pubic garden lots for years and never gotten a nibble. I think the public garden lots go to insiders in the know cause the wait lsits don't move. Five years and not a nibble.  I haven't moved from the same spot on the list. Maybe no one gives up lots but i doubt that. People move, die and stop gardening. Spots open up and those with connections get the garden plots, I guess.

Sigh.  I have few friends in Berkeley who own yards. 

How I wish Ihad a garden. Growing things is important to the human spirit. It connects us to everything.