In the zone

Thanks to everyone who stopped by Firehouse 13 last night for Green Zones: From the War Garden to Your Garden and the first-ever Urban Ag Spring Start Party.

The talks and discussion went over really well, and the seed-swapping table was hopping.  I got a chance to connect with gardeners, historians, and gardening historians from all over.

A spring party was a great outlet for gardeners with seeds, plants, and stories to share. As RI’s food gardening network continues to grow, imagine another garden event this fall?!?!?!?!

Today: Urban Agriculture Revival!

All the vegetables are ready to rumble at Firehouse 13 (41 Central Street, Providence).

Start at 5:30pm with Green Zones: From the War Garden to Your Garden. Check out 3 presentations on past and present gardening movements, and join the discussion.

Then at 7:30pm, it’s the first-ever Urban Ag Spring Start Party. Seed-swapping, plant-swapping, sharing info about garden and green groups, meeting other gardeners, etc. It’s a potluck, so bring a dish…as well as your seeds and plants to share.

Let’s start the spring together!

Green Zones Event…and Urban Ag Spring Start?

Check out the updated page for Green Zones: From the War Garden to Your Garden, a presentation on Victory Gardens, the Women’s Land Army of America, and how/why gardeners are growing their own food today. The event takes place on Tues., May 5, starting at 5:30pm at Firehouse 13, 41 Central St. in Providence.

A plan is stirring to hold an Urban Agriculture Spring Start Party afterwards. This will include seed/plant swapping, exchanging ideas, food, music, and kicking off the garden season together.

Community gardeners, backyard gardeners, local foodies, green folks, farmers, teachers, kids. . .can you help out with this emerging event?  Contact me at szurier at wesleyan dot edu or leave a comment, and I’ll be in touch.

A fine crop of potatoes you got there, grandpa!

Yesterday, I was catching up on some research at the Rhode Island Historical Society Library, which holds 43 linear feet of collections relating to the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company. I’ve mentioned Brown & Sharpe in previous posts, because National War Garden Commission founder Charles Lathrop Pack singled out this Rhode Island firm for sponsoring War Gardens in 1917. 

I focused on a dozen of the 43 linear feet: materials related to Luther D. Burlingame and wartime activity. Burlingame worked for Brown & Sharpe as engineer, and he was active in Rhode Island’s environmental movement in the early 20th century. He not only coordinated the firm’s War Gardens during World War I, but he also launched the state’s subsistence garden program in 1932.

In the last section of the last scrapbook in the last box I had requested, I found several items related to Brown & Sharpe’s activities during WWI. The prize was an 1918 article by Burlingame on “Shop Gardening as a War Measure: How Factory Employees Can Help Increase the Food Supply.” Glancing at the sample list of employees who tended garden plots, I saw a familiar name:

That’s my grandfather, Louis Zurier, who worked–and gardened–at Brown & Sharpe in the war years! I was stunned to encounter him on the pages of a magazine article, in a scrapbook, in a box, at a library. There he was, with 14 bushels of potatoes worth $24.80 in 1917. Good growing, grandpa!

Save the date! Green Zones: From the War Garden to Your Garden

On Tuesday, May 5, starting at 5:30pm, I’m hosting Green Zones: From the War Garden to Your Garden, a presentation on Victory Gardens, the Women’s Land Army of America, and how gardeners are growing their own food today. The event takes place at Firehouse 13, 41 Central Street in Providence.

Panelists include: Judy Barrett Litoff, Professor of History at Bryant University; Rich Pederson, City Farm Manager at Southside Community Trust; and Sarah Zurier, creator of Green Zone.

Green Zones: From the War Garden to Your Garden is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

More details to come this spring.

Getting “busy in an agricultural way”

You can read this, right? Then do it! Start A Garden.

For the past few months I have been spending some quality time at the microfilm readers at the central (don’t make me call it Empire) Providence Public Library. The Rhode Island Collection includes a subject index to the Providence Journal. I am grateful to those generations of librarians who typed out article titles and dates and page numbers on catalog cards.

I have found hundreds of articles about WWI-era war gardens, WWII-era victory gardens, school gardens, community gardens, mill village gardens, and the like. And as I spin the microfilm reels to the next relevant page, it’s hard not to get distracted by all the other news and advertisements of the day.

This ad, run in the classified section on 15 May 1917, was a happy find. In 1917, Rhode Island had a case of gardenmania. In addition to all the organized garden programs–school gardens, Governor’s mill village garden contest, factory gardens, demonstration gardens, community gardens, and vacant lot gardens–individual citizens were planting “pocket-edition” gardens in their own backyards. Vegetable gardening was a statewide movement, or as the ad would have it, “a universal planting crusade.” The more I read about the Progressives’ impact on the urban environment in the 1900s and 1910s, the more I think about how it’s time to renew their goals for healthier cities and citizens today.

Factory farming

In my research on Rhode Islanders’ wartime gardens, I expected to find precedents for school gardens, for community gardens, for public gardens, and for women and children going to work at local farms. I was surprised, however, to learn about the number of allotment gardens that local manufacturers provided for their workers.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the National War Garden Commission saluted the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company for establishing 30 acres of war gardens in Providence in 1917. Today I found a Providence Journal article announcing the kickoff of the B&S gardens–nearly 600 25′x80′ and 25′x100′ plots on and around Pleasant Valley Parkway. The company obtained, plowed, harrowed, fertilized, and staked the plots. The newspaper reported, “What is now a big, barren lot of land, is expected, within a few months, to become a huge field of potato plants and blossoming bean stalks. Here hundreds of employes [sic], aided by the company by which they are employed, will do their ‘bit’ for the country along agricultural lines and at the same time provide themselves with a generous supply of potatoes or beans for the next winter.” The photo depicts a worker and family preparing their garden in May 1917.

Several Rhode Island manufacturers provided land for free and materials (like seeds, fertilizer, tools) at cost to their employees. My running list through 1917 includes Stillwater Worsted Company; Manville Company; Wanskuck Company; Goddard Brothers; B&S; Pawtucket Rendering Company; and Slatersville Finishing Company.

It was a win-win situation for employee and employer alike. The employee received a free plot of prepared land; free or cheap supplies; food for their family; and an opportunity to support the war effort. Did the worker also get work time to garden? Not sure. The employer received the gratitude of their workers; control of their workers’ leisure time (more time in the garden = less in the bar or the union hall); stronger and healthier workers; and enviable public relations for their support of workers and the war effort.

Workplace gardens were common in Rhode Island and throughout the states during World War I. Know of any other examples, past or present?

Wartime gardens in RI: King Philip’s War

Last week, I visited the Providence Public Library’s Special Collections Department. One of the first things librarian Rick Ring showed me was an original WWII-era Victory Garden poster–which was a thrill after looking at countless tiny digital images online. There’s a large collection of materials relating to the two World Wars.

But the best thing Rick found was a book on Gardens of Colony and State: Gardens and Gardeners of the American Republic Before 1840 (edited by Alice G.B. Lockwood, 1931). The Rhode Island chapters are outstanding, although unfootnoted. Aaarrrrgh!

During King Philip’s War (1675-76), some European colonists fled the mainland for Aquidneck (aka Rhode Island). Check out how on this part of John Seller’s “Mapp of New England” (ca. 1675), RI is labeled “PLYMOUTH COLONY,” and Aquidneck Island is labeled “Rode Island.” They found temporary asylum with relatives in Portsmouth.  According to the (five) authors of the RI chapters, the settlers farmed every square inch of the island during the war years, pushing aside ornamental or experimental gardens, planting crops, and allowing animals to graze the remainder. Borrowing a term from World War I, the authors concluded “’War gardens’ were imperative.”

To aid refugees and locals alike, the Town of Portsmouth voted to provide 100 acres of the Town Commons; “for those that want relief…and what shall be so lent to them, they shall improve by sowing and planting for the time of two years from the date of this meeting.” In short, the Town of Portsmouth responded to wartime crisis by providing public land for community gardening. When most of Rhode Island’s population were farm families, and all of Rhode Island depended on local food, it was absolutely critical to prioritize food production.

And it’s still a priority, if you ask Michael Pollan. Read his “Farmer In Chief” essay in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, and we’ll catch up soon.

Out of the garden, into the frying pan

Green Zone has been slacking transitioning. As September winds down, I’ve slowed down on tending the garden and blog. I cooked up Green Zone’s kale and beet greens with a whole lot of garlic and oil for the Firehouse 13 potluck. How’s that for closure?

I still have some seed gathering to do: morning glories, bachelor’s button, dill, and black-and-pink scarlet runner bean beans. If you can get to Providence for a pickup, I’d be glad to set aside some Green Zone seeds for you!

Now, I’ve got to hit the books, looking for information on Rhode Island’s history of war gardens, liberty gardens, victory gardens, community gardens, school gardens, allotment gardens.  If you’re familiar with an example in RI, please let me know. Is it true that there’s a guy who still tends his WWII-era Victory Garden in Bristol?  Did your parents garden at school, or did your grandmother volunteer on a farm during during the war? Did you tune out during the Vietnam War and go back to the land?

I’ll share bits and pieces from my research as it progresses, and I’ll continue to blog sporadically about gardens I encounter. Doesn’t this look like an installation artist’s work on Parcel 12 (“triangle parcel” at Exchange St.)? A cluster of mossy bumps amidst the seven grassy hills (or was it six)? Actually it’s a bunch of those gorgeous Downtown flower and vine baskets dumped on the ground.

On the verge

Green Zone is teetering on the verge.

The garden is slowly shutting down as bugs and autumn and rootyness take over. I’m aiming to keep the plants alive through September. Green Drinks (on Sept. 18, be there!) will be a closing reception for the garden. Firehouse 13 is thinking about installing a bigger and brawnier garden next year, possibly with tires, so I’m leaving the Green Zone eight behind. Soil will be dumped back in my compost bin–or maybe at a new compost at Firehouse–and I’ll take the shopping bags to the store for recycling. I think the shoes will walk home with me for future planting.

The end of the September will also mark a new direction for the blog. RI Council for the Humanities gave me a grant to pursue research on the history of Rhode Island’s wartime gardens. Thank you, RICH! This will give me a chance to follow the leads I’ve found so far…30 acres of War Gardens at Brown and Sharpe, a guy in Bristol who still tends his WWII-era Victory Garden, local garden clubs who coordinated activities during the wars, etc. I’ll use the blog to post updates from my research.

As part of the public outreach for the grant project, I’ll organize a discussion panel to present my research and some other points of view on victory gardens. Look out for that next spring.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the verge…just like this pink and orange zinnia-filled verge on Doyle Avenue