The Deep Dish

An insider look at food and farming from Civil Eats

As we celebrate the height of summer, this edition of our members-only newsletter focuses on gardening, with insights from experts around the country and the world. We’ve long reported on community gardens and urban agriculture, and in our feature this month, we investigate the surprising restrictions on growing food in your own backyard, and what a “right to garden” law in one state means for the rest of the nation.

In the sections below, we follow up on previous reporting about Eastie Farm in Boston to check in on how the climate-resilient farm has fared during the pandemic. We also provide an update on how seed shortages are affecting gardeners, and how garden mentors are helping people set up their own food forests. In the middle of a recent heat wave in the U.K., we spoke to organic gardener and author Sally Morgan about edible gardening through extreme weather, and we asked farmers to share their best tips on growing a garden with soil health, climate, and resiliency in mind.

This month, we also have a special favor to ask of you: Please share your thoughts about your Civil Eats membership with us. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our membership program, we want to hear from you, our loyal readers. This survey should only take a few minutes, and your input will greatly help us serve you better. Thank you for your time and support!

As always, thank you for reading: Civil Eats members like you make our work possible. If you love what you’re reading, please encourage your friends and colleagues to become members today and help us continue to tell these important stories. Members receive our weekly reporting round-up as well as The Deep Dish. We hope you enjoy these unique deep dives and first looks—and we welcome your feedback.

~ The Civil Eats Editors

• First Look: Two States Have Passed 'Right to Garden' Laws. Will Others Follow Their Lead?
• The Follow-Up:
  • Eastie Farm Is Still Growing Food, Community, and Climate Justice
  • If the Pandemic Garden Boom Is Over, What’s Next?
• The Check-In: Sally Morgan on Gardening Through Climate Change
• News You Can Use: Gardening Tips from the Pros
• Unseen Scenes: What Civil Eats Is Growing
• What We're Reading

First Look

Two States Have Passed 'Right to Garden' Laws. Will Others Follow Their Lead?
In recent years, Illinois and Florida have passed legislation protecting citizens’ right to garden on their property, and the lessons learned from those efforts are shaping plans around the country.

BY KATHERINE KORNEI

Carrots, baby kale, and spinach never tasted so sweet. After emerging from a multi-year legal battle over gardening, Nicole Virgil is looking forward to cultivating those vegetables and more this winter in her backyard. Growing one’s own food, central to human existence for millennia, has suddenly become a hot-button topic in some communities.
 
From Michigan to Massachusetts, people have been thwarted—or even outright banned—from growing food on their own property. But thanks to the concerted efforts of people like Virgil and their legal allies, “right to garden” laws are slowly gaining traction. Such legislation remains scarce at the state level, however—only Illinois and Florida have laws on the books, although Maine recently updated its constitution with a “right to food” amendment.
 
Charged with Gardening
 
In the spring of 2011, Julie Bass installed several raised beds in the front yard of her suburban property in Oak Park, Michigan. Bass quickly learned that her gardening efforts, intended to teach her kids about growing their own food, had provoked the ire of her city. Bass was cited with a civil misdemeanor for not planting “grass, shrubs, or other suitable live plant material.”
 
“I was left thinking that they took a pretty broad and unwarranted interpretation of that code,” Bass wrote on a blog she started to document her experience. When Oak Park officials threatened to prosecute Bass with a more serious criminal misdemeanor, which would potentially come with a 93-day jail sentence, she took her story public. (The charges were ultimately dismissed.)

Eastie Farm Still Grows Food, Community, and Climate Justice
BY MEG WILCOX

When Kannan Thiruvengadam and a small group of neighbors founded Eastie Farm in the historically immigrant, but rapidly gentrifying, community of East Boston, climate resiliency and environmental education were top of mind. Flooding occurs regularly during storms in the neighborhood, which is enveloped on three sides by the harbor and a river. As temperatures continue to rise, that flooding will only get worse.

Thiruvengadam (pictured above left) viewed food as a way to invite neighbors who might not otherwise know one another to do something productive together and ultimately forge the bonds that induce neighbors to help each other in times of emergency. So, seven years ago, he and others started the tiny urban farm on an abandoned, trash-strewn, weedy lot.

When Civil Eats first visited Eastie Farm in 2019, it was a hurly-burly of open compost heaps and bins, potted flowers, rain barrels, uncultivated areas, and circular raised beds sprouting a riot of zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, and herbs. The farm’s unkempt appearance reflected the group’s collective, and largely volunteer, approach. Eastie donated most of its produce at the time to a soup kitchen and left the rest for neighbors to harvest. It teamed up with local nonprofit and immigrant organizations to offer hands-on, environmental educational programs to elementary school-aged children, teens, and the larger community.

“We’re not trying to maximize food production,” Thiruvengadam told Civil Eats at the time. “We’re sowing seeds for future citizens.”

The pandemic changed things. Today, food access is a bigger part of Eastie’s agenda, although environmental education and community-building are still central. Early in the pandemic, Eastie raised funds to pay local restaurants to cook 5,000 meals per week, which helped the restaurants stay open and pay their staff.

The meal program created bonds in the community, Thiruvengadam says. “People didn't know how much their own neighbors were suffering in terms of food insecurity, how close to the poverty line they were, when COVID hit and suddenly they couldn’t afford to buy diapers.” It also led to “cross-pollination,” he says, because, for example, they provided Halal food cooked by a Somali restaurant not just to the North African immigrants who requested it, but to Hispanic community members as well.

The volunteer networks and communication systems that developed around the farm during the pandemic persist today. In fact, Mutual Aid Eastie spun off last year into its own organization.

Instead of free meals, the farm now provides weekly boxes of fresh produce grown on the farm, or donated by nearby farms such as Gaining Ground. The organization now supports 650 families with food aid, in addition to offering its own community supported agriculture (CSA) program. The CSA sells shares at market rate, offers a discounted rate, and gives a percentage away for free.

Overall, Eastie has grown tremendously, acquiring six new sites to manage (two are mini-farms; four are school-based gardens) and hiring four full-time staff. The original location, on Sumner Street, has been substantially upgraded. They added water and electricity hook-ups, the imposing chain link fence is gone, and the farm now has a path to facilitate wheelchair access. A new covered seating area in the front offers refuge on a hot day and a convenient location for food distribution.

Thiruvengadam worries that the “crazy, COVID-induced growth could be more like noise as opposed to a signal,” meaning that the money that funds Eastie’s staff and programs may dry up—even though the need is still there, he says.

He never thought of Eastie as an emergency response organization, but seeing the depths of food insecurity in East Boston shifted his thinking. He recalls a child from one of his environmental education programs messaging him on WhatsApp. “Mr. Kannan, I would like some oranges or apples. I have no fruit. I have no food.”

However, environmental education and climate resiliency are still front and center for Thiruvengadam; one of the farm developments he’s most proud of is a novel geothermal-powered greenhouse that will allow it to not only grow food during the winter but also provide a place where it can host its hands-on education programs during the cold months.

“That way the kids can come in the wintertime and enjoy the feeling of being outdoors,” he says, while learning about sustainable farming, geothermal energy, and community resiliency.

If the Pandemic Garden Boom Is Over, What’s Next?
BY LISA HELD

During the first two years of the pandemic, seed companies struggled to keep up with surging demand, and individuals and nonprofits launched many new efforts to provide seeds, gardening education, and other resources to communities around the country.

Now, more than two years in, things are settling down.

Seed supply is more stable: In a Facebook group with more than 125,000 passionate members, gardeners said that, unlike during the past two seasons, the seeds they ordered were almost all in stock and arrived on time. One reason that’s likely true is that companies like Burpee and Hudson Valley Seed Co. made changes to their operations last year to better accommodate fluctuations and surges in demand. In the latest edition of Baker Creek’s famed catalog, founder Jere Gettle announced that the heirloom seed company was moving into a new, larger seed and shipping warehouse “to better serve you and continue to save more seeds.”

However, there’s also some evidence that a portion of pandemic gardeners are already abandoning their spades. One recent survey found that while 34 percent of respondents said they planted new gardens because they were home more in 2020, only 11 percent said working from home had inspired them to plant a garden in 2021. And Washington, D.C.-based advocate Reana Kovalcik said that national attention to her Share a Seed program, which brought together gardeners in various cities to share supplies, has “dropped off.”

But rather than discouraging her work, Kovalcik said she was still seeing enthusiasm growing on the ground in her city. “One thing I am noticing is that a lot more folks I meet have now tried their hand at growing,” she said. “I’m trying to give troubleshooting advice for those who had a less-than-successful first try and encourage those who had stronger starts.”

Share a Seed is also planting deeper roots: Kovalcik just completed three permanent “seed libraries” in partnership with the University of the District of Columbia and DC Youth Build. The free seed boxes are being placed at community gardens and urban farms and each come with a bench to encourage gathering.

The Check-In: Sally Morgan on Gardening Through Climate Change
BY  NAOMI STARKMAN
If you’re struggling with your garden in these times of uncertain and extreme weather, there may be no one better to talk to than botanist and long-time organic gardener Sally Morgan, the British-based author of The Healthy Vegetable Garden and The Climate Change Garden. Morgan, who is also the editor of Organic Farming magazine, owns Empire Farm, a 100-acre organic farm in Somerset, in southwest England. A champion of resilient, low-carbon, and peat-free gardens, Morgan advises her readers how to use sustainable approaches to cope with the challenges of a changing climate through regenerative gardening and permaculture. As the U.K. was in the middle of a record heatwave, Morgan spoke with us about the importance of employing no-till methods and cover crops in your backyard, the art of loving weeds, and the future of saving seeds.

As climate change makes itself felt, we are seeing so many changes in the threats from pests and disease—some are appearing and some are disappearing. On the other hand, we have all these insects, pollinators, and birds now in decline. What should we be doing to maintain a healthy ecosystem and encourage more pollinators and insects in our gardens?

Diversity at every point. We need to grow as much in our own growing spaces as possible. We might be veg growers, but I had lots of flowers in my veg plot. And at certain times a year, it was more like a flower plot than a veg plot. The more types of flowers, the more varieties of vegetables that I grow, that will give me the opportunity to attract pollinators into my garden, and also parasitic wasps and other predatory species to control pests that may get out of hand.

We should get diversity in the varieties of crops that we grow and diversity within an individual crop; so if I'm growing cabbages, I grow four or five different types of cabbages. Lots of different companion plants, lots of different other flowers around the plot. It's a mixed plot.

I think if every gardener did this, we would have a really good effect, particularly in urban areas where it's sad to think the butterflies and bees are in decline. If all of the gardeners are working towards this diversity, I'm hopeful that we can reverse some of the [negative] changes.

In many of your books, you talk about the fact that soils have lost between 50 and 70 percent of the carbon they previously held. You also mention how practices like no-till are more important than ever. We've reported a lot on larger-scale no-till farming in the U.S.; can you share how those principles apply in our own backyards? Why is it important for climate-resilient gardening?

For gardeners, no-dig or no-till, as you refer to it, has its benefits. Every time you put your fork in that ground and pull up soil, you're exposing it to oxidization, and that carbon just evaporates. For me, [not disturbing the soil] is capturing that carbon, and putting the layer of compost or mulch on the surface of that soil protects it through the winter months. At the moment, we've got a heatwave here—it's about 32°C (89°F)—and [that layer of material] is protecting my soil.

And then mulching! I've been mulching my own beds this week. It will protect your soil; it will improve the drainage and retain moisture; and [it] gives more organic matter for your soil organisms and leads to healthier soil.

The other thing that a gardener can do is compost everything. Composting and locking in that carbon in your own closed loop is great.

Let's talk a little bit about extreme weather. One of our team members lives on the East Coast, and she's been having more trouble than usual growing things this year because there's been so much rain and constant moisture. What advice do you have for her?

For that type of thing, it's actually humus, and getting organic matter in the soil, so that it is more resilient against extra water. Drainage is quite tricky. In the past, I would have suggested adding grit to soil. But now the evidence seems to suggest that grit actually doesn't do any good unless you put lots of it in. So, I think we're down to mulching and making the soil more loam-like so it'll be able to lose that extra moisture. And maybe use more raised beds, so you can lift that soil off the ground, or give it a bit more drainage. But it's really difficult. The other thing that one can do is to look for varieties that might be a little bit more resilient against getting wet.

The other thing that I found this year particularly with the cold, wet soil—I haven’t been planting things out quite as early as I would have done; I've been planting them in pots about three to four weeks later than usual, so that the soil has a chance to dry out and warm up. And I suspect that, going forward, I'm going to be relying more on containerized growing until the soil has caught up and is ready to be planted. You just have to experiment a little bit with what you do.

Conversely, in the western U.S., we are contending with such a severe drought. You describe water catchment, and greywater guerilla efforts, to help preserve your garden. What other tips do you have for gardening through a drought?

Water harvesting is absolutely everything. But again, you need organic matter in the soil because that will give you resilience against drought. Lots of mulching, and maybe deep-bed mulching, will do well in a dry environment, because it's giving you six- to eight inches of material that prevents the evaporation of water.

Look for varieties going forward that are more [drought] tolerant; maybe we won't be able to grow our favorite crops in the future because the climate will have changed too much. We have to look further south to the types of crops that we can grow in a drought environment. The other thing that may happen as the climate becomes more extreme is that we'll be growing crops at the wrong time of year. When I travel around the Mediterranean, they're not growing their crops with extreme heat in the summer months; they've grown them already.

We may have to think about how we garden in the areas where we're living and adapt. When you look at the way that some of the Native American peoples used to grow in extreme conditions and how they would trap the water—they would grow in waffle beds, or in the Canary Islands in the Atlantic, which is a volcanic island, they are using this idea of volcanic rock around a growing area with very little topsoil in it. And that little environment traps the humidity. If you are suffering from extreme temperatures in summer, you need to look back in history and see how people would have grown 300 years ago and adapt some of those really simple, neat ideas.

You've been researching and writing about climate change gardening for so long, what do you think about saving seeds? And how do we know whether we're saving the right seed for the future?

Five years ago, I would have said to you, “Local is best, grow the seed that is adapted to your own soil and your own microclimate.” Increasingly, I've been looking at the work of some of the researchers over here and how they are looking at genetics. And you should be sourcing the seed from the south of you, so that it's more like the climate that you’re going to experience in the future.

For me in southern England, I've been planting new orchards over the last five years, [and] I've been looking for varieties that grow well in the southwest of France, 2 degrees latitude from me. In North America, they're really worried about sourcing saplings for coniferous plantations, particularly up in British Columbia. So, they've been looking at seed material from California, Oregon, and Washington and growing it in British Columbia, because they're thinking that if the genetics of the same species is more adapted to a southern climate, maybe it will do well in British Columbia, in 50 to 100 years.

Although I will always grow my own parsnip seed, I have been trying something called population seed—mixing up different varieties. I picked up another variety, which is more prominent in France, and a local community variety, and I'm mixing them all up and allowing them to cross pollinate to get what we call a composite population, and it's a real mix up of all the genetics. I'm hoping that there'll be individuals within that bed that might be suited to the conditions of this year.

I'm doing this because we've had an amazing experiment over here through organic wheat growing, called population wheat. They've been growing all different types of wheat together, allowing them all to cross pollinate and taking those seeds and growing them again and allowing them to cross pollinate. When they look at their wheat fields, it's all jumbled and tall and short—it’s amazing. But they know that in any year, whatever the weather throws at them, there will be some plants that are going to do well.

We need to come back to diversity. We need to have diverse populations of seeds, ideally adapted to our own local area, but with a few other varieties tossed in, to allow us to be resilient. We want population parsnips and population beans, and we're not going to be looking for uniformity. In the future, we're going to be looking for variety and hope that one variety will survive and do well.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.