A Saunter Through Summer: Is Urban Gardening For You?

On Saturday, Community Growers of Montgomery County is offering a free Garden Walk to four backyard gardens located in the westside neighborhoods of Crawfordsville. The Garden Walk takes place between 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. Participants are invited to do the entire walk to all four locations or visit individual gardens. Organizers ask participants to bring their own lunches. The Garden Walk group will eat lunch in Kathy Steele Park (located on West Main Street right behind the Youth Service Bureau at 808 W. Pike). Community Growers of Montgomery County (CGMC) will transport your lunch for you.

This Garden Walk is not an ordinary “come and marvel” garden tour but rather a chance to see and learn how four gardening families with varied levels of experience have changed their city yards into native plant beds (pollinator gardens) and vegetable gardens. Participants will be able to observe and ask questions at each c. 30-minute stop. Each garden and each gardener has a story to share. Signs will mark each of the locations and you may either walk or drive between gardens.

Tom Meeks and Heidi Walsh (1st Stop at 207 W. Main at 10 a.m.) love to cook. As new gardeners, they find it especially rewarding to walk out the backdoor to pick a sprig of rosemary or a tomato for a recipe for dinner. It has been a happy surprise to them to experience how gardening connects them with community members, family, and friends alike. Most other differences simply disappear when people share tips about soil or plant species or shade planting. Gardeners commiserate about comical mistakes—“we thought a zucchini plant was an eggplant our first year,” notes Tom—and all gardeners rue visits by squirrels and rabbits.

As a young family, Tom and Heidi were first expecting and then welcoming a new baby just as the pandemic began. They found themselves at home, their work patterns either changed or evaporated. This meant their time together expanded: Heidi and Tom resolved to try gardening. They built a garden box and began to explore growing tomatoes and peppers. At the Farmers’ Market which they visit “every single week,” they had begun to buy and use fresh and local vegetables. They also developed acquaintanceships with experienced gardeners that they could pepper with questions. They jumped in!–and now are in their third year.

Their garden this year might well be called a “pasta garden” as it focuses on peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, and herbs. Come to Tom and Heidi’s on Saturday to see how various containers—from a five-gallon bucket to a large raised bed—can be used to start and house a garden. As Tom says, “Now that we have adopted gardening as our [family] hobby, we look toward introducing new fruits and vegetables and maybe making compost. In the future, they plan to introduce more pollinator plants into the mix. Their little son Henry is already well introduced to family gardening. Their special challenge this year is to learn better how to preserve harvests through canning and other preservation techniques.

The second stop is also on West Main Street. This segment begins at 11:05 a.m. and is located at newlyweds Nate Tompkins and Jackie McDermott’s home at 511 W. Main. Nate is new to gardening. He will show visitors what he has in a small space, in pots, in other containers, and along a fence. The Tompkins/McDermott family property has limited sun and they will talk about how they work around that.

After visiting these two gardens, the Garden Walk group will head to Kathy Steele Park to eat lunch (11:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.).

After the noon break, the Garden Walk heads on to its third stop at Kathy and Jim Brown’s home at 912 W. Wabash Avenue. If you wish to join in for the afternoon portion, join the group at the Browns’ garden at 12:25 p.m. On this property, Kathy, a longtime, small-space gardener, will show visitors her raised beds and how she over-winters vegetables in a small greenhouse/cold frame set up. Visitors will get to see what a large number of food varieties can be grown in a small space.

Both Jackie McDermott and her husband Nate Tompkins (2nd Stop, 511 W. Main, 11:05 a.m.) are transplants to the Midwest. Like their neighbors three blocks up the street (the Meeks/Walsh family), they were glad to find some good Midwest dirt in their new backyard. They too began gardening during the spring of 2020. The nature of their property doesn’t leave a lot of available ground for a standard garden so they got creative and put plants primarily in pots, in a couple of raised beds, and began experimenting with growing things vertically up their fence. The couple has planted lots of sunflowers and currently sport a fine vertical stand of them along a brick wall. Nate says what encourages them to garden is really simple: “we like to watch things grow, to see flowers in the yard, and support the pollinators.”

Nate and Jackie are excited about connecting with others growing locally through the Garden Walk. Visitors will enjoy and be impressed by the imaginative growing places this family provides for cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, and sunflowers.

Kathy Brown (3rd Stop at 912 W. Wabash at 12:45 pm) has a job downtown that keeps her very busy interacting with kids and grown ups and otherwise being in the public eye. For her, gardening is a respite, “a relaxing and productive way to wind down,” as she notes. Kathy also finds it really satisfying to grow her own produce. She uses her vegetables fresh in the summer, of course, but also really appreciates pulling “bags of vegetables out of the freezer and know[ing] exactly where they came from” during the winter.

When Kathy and her husband Jim bought their first home, Kathy immediately tried some gardening though she first focused on roses and other perennial flowers. When the Browns moved to Crawfordsville in 2003, they built a few raised beds to grow vegetables. When their children were little and needed lots of backyard play space, Jim and Kathy had little time to do “more than dabble.” Once the kids grew and swing sets and sandboxes could go away, Kathy began to expand and experiment with food plants. She currently grows a large variety of vegetables in a relatively small space. One of her big adventures in a little yard has been adding a cold frame. Because of this season extending space, last year they “were able to eat at least a little bit of fresh produce from early March all the way through early January.”

Kathy encourages new gardeners to start small, have fun, don’t fear experimentation, “take good notes and expect to make mistakes.” Gardens and gardeners alike prosper by hands-on learning.

Dianne Combs (4th Stop at 1418 W. Market at 1:15 p.m.) has a mother who made sure her daughters knew where their food came from. As a little girl, Dianne was entrusted with a little garden patch next to the backdoor of their house. She felt so important and learned very young how plants, grow, bloom and fruit, and how they should be cared for. Dianne has never looked back and has been gardening all her life, making sure that her three children had gardening experiences like she did. Dianne’s big south-facing yard-become-garden testifies to the soil and species health that home gardeners can bring into their own small patches of ground whether the gardens be in a container or two or in a space big enough for fruits and nuts and everything in between. Dianne has been gardening in her current location since 2005.

From West Wabash, the Garden Walk will head to its fourth and final stop at 1418 W. Market Street, the home of Dianne and Bill Combs. This stop begins at 1:15 p.m. Combs’ garden visitors will be able to see a yard nearly entirely converted into gardens. Dianne will show tour participants her greenhouse and how she is currently working to increase soft fruit and berry crops in the yard even as she continues to expand her collection of native pollinator plants. She grows many edibles too and often mingles vegetables among flowers.

The four gardening families on this first annual Garden Walk sponsored by Community Growers of Montgomery County have various backgrounds and life experiences that have led them to care about putting a spade in the ground or a trowel in a pot.

Please join Community Growers of Montgomery County on Saturday for this chance to learn, connect, and to celebrate gardening, growing, and soil health. Anyone who eats food surely joins Nate Tompkins in expressing gratitude “to all our farmers” who grow our food and keep our soil healthy for the future.