Gardening as Therapy

Brenda Barnes,President, Home Grown Food Network, Inc.
Santa Monica, California
August 5, 2010

My husband and co-founder of Home Grown Food Network Peter has been very ill lately. For the past four months he has off and on become more and more unable to eat. Lately it got to where he could not even drink anything. He has lost 40 pounds, when he was thin anyway (we’re like Mr. and Mrs. Jack Spratt!), so he was looking gaunt and depressed. It has been getting scarier and scarier.

Two months ago he was hospitalized with chest pains, but after finding out his heart was fine, he was discharged and told (since we don’t have health insurance) to get an appointment at a free clinic to find out what the problem was. It took another two months to do that. When he finally saw a doctor, fortunately he was good and dedicated enough to have Peter hospitalized at the County UCLA teaching hospital immediately.

Peter has seen a total of six doctors and many bunches of people coming by to do rounds on him in the past five days since then—he said he feels like he’s at Seattle Grace on Grey’s Anatomy. He has had two hours-long exotic tests of his digestive system, enough to know he has a bleeding ulcer blocking the passage to his large intestine, so food and drink was just piling up and escaping to wrong places, causing him to throw it up. They don’t know yet if the tissue they took out is cancerous, but Peter already knows more about cancer, just in case, than we ever wanted to know. A million people a year in the U.S. Are diagnosed with cancer each year, he told me, and there are 15 million survivors of cancer in the U.S., so it is not a death sentence to have cancer. Today he was scheduled for another test. Yesterday they started treating the ulcer with a drug called omnio something.

I’ve been home in the dark, figuratively, in danger of worrying myself ill. Instead, I gardened and worked. Gardening made it possible for me to work, which has always been my addiction of choice. So I’m coping well.

About the gardening. I had projects to do this summer based in Santa Monica, so I’ve been staying in a single-wide trailer with a single-wide built-on, in a Park 29 blocks from the beach. I bought this trailer for my son when he was 16. It’s been in our family ever since, almost 25 years, with various combinations and permutations of people staying in it, or just being empty waiting for guests. The result of all that for the yard was total neglect.

When I got here in April the yard was covered with crab grass, and it had been so long since it was watered that even the crab grass was spindly. I started weeding in the front—where I saw it the most often so the terrible appearance bothered me the most. I covered that space with mulch so I wouldn’t have to weed again, and then took time to build a gate from recycled materials I found in the alleys and paint it with acrylic paints. That gate isn’t finished yet, but every time my grandson Aiden (age 9) and I feel like talking a break we paint it some more. Last week we painted the backgrounds on the “signs” I had made on it yellow. That improved it. Everything we do improves something. I hope I can do this blog well enough without Peter to upload the picture of that. It’s a great gate,
and the signs are in the theme of the Welcome to Paradise painted in red at the top. The one I like best says, “Santa Monica is Chumash for Heaven.” (zoom in) All the neighbors stopped by to talk about the gate and meet us, so it was an unexpected icebreaker.

I noticed the soil smelled like manure while I was weeding. I mentioned it to my son, and he said the sewer backed up on the ground every year or so, so we should not plant any food in that soil. That was a real heartbreaker for me. All I wanted to plant was food in that soil.

Then Home Depot had a sale on gallon containers of tomatoes and peppers, for 99 cents each. Aiden and I picked out the best two of each variety, and a strawberry gallon that wasn’t on sale, for $4, plus a flower plant for his mother. Total cost: $17. We came home and arranged all of them except one Early Girl tomato we planted Topsy-Turvy style (“as seen on TV,” Aiden said) in a 5-gallon pickle bucket we got from Bristol Farms. Peter drilled the planting hole in it, and we guessed how to do it, pretty well, as it turned out.

Then I decided a tree growing in back of the trailer was blocking the sun too much on the plants, so I pruned it day after day. Finally I asked Peter to get on the roof and cut it down. (This was before he got sick.) Our neighbor John saw him doing it and said he had much better saws. In about ten minutes he had the whole tree cut down. The entire yard was covered with limbs, some of them 30 feet long. No wonder that tree blocked the sun! So I thought I would be weeks separating the small limbs into tiny ones that could be mulch as they were for the rest of the yard (no more weeding!), and limbs that we could use for something. It turned out, though, that it took only three days, and a bonus was John and I put up an “engineering marvel” V-shaped entryway to the side yard, which crosses a good 20 feet in the air. By that time I also had so many trunk-size limbs that I put them across the side entry and made it an impassable fence. I love it, since we had also blocked off the whole back yard so our garden would be safe, and from then on no people cut through our yard, as they had been doing.

About that time I got to moving the compost pile we had made out of all the tree-trimmings that had fallen on the roof and naturally composted there. That is when I saw open sewer pipes and squishy black soil. Ugh!! I called the health department, and the man there told me our lives were in danger, to get out of the yard, take off the shoes I had worn there, have the inside of the house cleaned professionally, etc. He cited the landlord and plumbers came that afternoon and got roots they said looked to be ten years’ growth out of the pipes. No wonder the sewer backs up. They said some landlords have pipes cleaned out every three months! This one—every ten years, after we call the Health Department. So I was glad I had already mentioned the soil was toxic in the decrease petition I filed with the Rent Control Board. I didn’t know at the time how toxic, but to have to garden in containers when we have a yard is bad enough, I think.

That put our gardening back about a week. No one could walk in the yard until we were sure the sewage had dried up. I watered the area every day as the plumbers told me to to help it percolate down, but how disgusting!. I also begged for more mulch from my neighbors, and ended up with a good five inches everywhere.

The next week we planted and watered in wildflower seeds on the side I had weeded, a California mixture. It said guaranteed to grow, but I didn’t believe it, so now we have one plant every half-inch on the entire bed!

As you can see from the images, (click to enlarge), everything is happily growing and growing…

That is going to need some major thinning. Also, there is hardly any sun there, so the plants are growing very slowly. We probably should have planted a shade mixture instead. I see nasturtiums, sweet peas, and California poppies, plus six or seven other plants I don’t recognize. It will be fun identifying them when they grow big enough.

It’s been about six weeks since then, and I still haven’t got all the tomatoes and peppers transplanted. It is a lot of work to mix potting soil and compost for five gallons. I don’t like to give unpleasant jobs to Aiden. I’ve talked to too many people turned off to gardening by having to weed. So I’m just keeping at it. We’ve had 10 beautiful tomatoes, 10 Anaheim chiles (I made chile rellenos I thought were the best ever one day for lunch—that’s how it is to grow things yourself), and about 20 jalapenos. Six bell peppers are almost big enough to eat, but some critters ate about two dozen strawberries. After that we bought and put out squirrel repellant and bird netting. This week I bought little mixed lettuce plants and planted them in a topsy-turvy.

more pictures here

We’ll see how that grows.

So this has been such good therapy for me. I am too busy to worry. Whether we ever get any more food out of it or not, that is enough to make it well worth doing.

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