DC Urban Gardeners

Spring Cuisine at the Historical Society

Recently D.C. Urban Gardeners received a totally unexpected e-mail. It seems the Historical Society of D.C. was looking for someone to put together a series of practical garden talks. They'd first contacted the U.S. Botanical Gardens and--surprise, surprise--the Botanical Gardens had recommended us.

We were thrilled and flattered. There was just one little bitty problem. The Historical Society wanted the talks to start NOW, as in, How about next month? Our webmaster Susan Harris and I quick put our heads together to create a rough outline for the series. But as far as giving the rapidly approaching first lecture, there was only one thing to do: I volunteered to whip together some kind of Powerpoint show.

I have to admit, I'm a bit of a ham. I like speaking in public. It's fun. Occasionally I give talks about composting. The last time I put on a show in a formal setting was for the Smithsonian Associates, where I performed before a packed house on the subject of "Catering Your Own Dinner Party." (It was a huge success, and I had a blast doing it.)

As to the question of what to talk about at the Historical Society, the basic guideline was that it needed to include something practical, something the audience could take home with them and use. Two things I know something about are growing food and cooking it. So that became the program, a seasonal look at what's growing in an urban kitchen garden one mile from the White House and how to turn it into delicious spring cuisine.

Asparagus, rhubarb, strawberries, lettuces, greens, fava beans, peas--I covered pretty much all the bases, with something about how to plant and grow the crops (think root crowns and lots of organic matter for asparagus), to a little history (did you know the dried root of rhubarb was a highly prized medicinal "purgative" for centuries before people discovered you could make pies out of the stalks?), to actual cooking methods and recipes (getting the fava beans out of their tough casings is definitely worth the effort).

Many of the recipes, I'm not at all ashamed to admit, were lifted from my personal blog, The Slow Cook: asparagus frittata, rhubarb tea cakes, classic strawberry shortcake, salad of spicy greens. I even talked a little about foraging for edible plants such as chickweed, dandelions and ramps with a recipe for the dandelion wine now fermenting in my pantry. (I'm thinking dandelion mimosas for our next Urban Gardeners meeting.)

So when the big day arrived on Saturday, I was psyched. I packed up my laptop and my Powerpoint show and headed off for the Historical Society's incredible digs at the old Carnegie Library building downtown. They have a high-tech auditorium with a huge screen and seats for almost 150. I stood by the front door, soaking in an expansive view south to the newly renovated Portrait Gallery and waiting for the eager hordes to show.

I waited. And waited. Finally, we started the program about 15 minutes later than scheduled. There may have been 10 people in the audience. I felt silly standing at a podium, so I grabbed the mike and basically kicked off my shoes. It was a lovely time, although a bit more intimate than what I'd been expecting.

So it's back to that dratted publicity issue. The Historical Society had placed an ad somewhere in the Washington Post as well as the Washington City Paper, but we need to get more creative with this public relations thing. Susan's talk on sustainable gardening is coming up May 17, so there's no time to lose.

Note: Susan Harris is not only a co-founder of D.C. Urban Gardeners and our webmaster, but famously is one of the co-authors of the Garden Rant blog and writes so many other blogs it's hard to keep track. She blogs about sustainable gardening and maintains a website loaded with information about how to garden naturally and with kindness toward the environment.

If you plan to be anywhere near the District of Columbia on May 17, save the date. Susan's talk promises to be a barn burner. You can reserve a seat at RSVP@historydc.org, or by calling the Historical Society at 202 383-1850.

--Posted by Ed Bruske

Teaching Teachers to Garden

Each year one of the groups I work with, D.C. Schoolyard Greening, holds a two-day workshop aimed at helping more teachers create gardens at their schools. This is the second year that we've held our hands-on session at the Washington Youth Garden in the National Arboretum. In the picture at left, Gilda Allen, of the D.C. Department of the Environment, Watershed Protection Division, leads a session in soil testing and composting.

This year we were lucky to have Judy Tiger, former executive director of Garden Resources of Washington, opening the session with some detailed advice on working with kids outdoors. Taking a group of 20 or more children into the garden is no easy trick. You can't just open the door and turn them loose. Judy has years of experience and lots of good tips for keeping kids focused--or at least not starting a riot.

Rule number one: Never let kids play with the garden hose. (Or maybe just once on a special occasion.) And a suggestion: Don't tell kids they are spreading compost. Tell them they are sprinkling "fairy dust."

Is it just my imagination, or are our teachers getting younger, smarter and more enthusiastic about this school gardening concept? We had about two dozen enroll this year. That's a great turnout, especially considering that in years past, the teachers were paid to be there.

We divided the group in two and they switched between two workshops in the morning--Gilda's on soil and composting and another on seed starting and transplanting. Claire Cambardella of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation brought in a homemade lunch of fresh, local ingredients (and even home-baked rolls). Then we were back in the field for two more workshops, garden maintenance and creating garden lesson plans.

Somehow I got tagged to handle the maintenance end. For an organic gardener that usually means talking about weeds. But I prefer to talk about how modern gardening is turning back the clock, rejecting pesticides and artificial fertilizers and reviving a more intimate relationship with nature and natural rhythms. In our scheme, maintenance is more about building great soil. Still, we give the teachers a very cool Japanese gardening tool that looks like a cross between a chef's knife and a martial arts weapon. It's just the thing for digging out weeds at the roots.

My partner this year in the maintenance division was Marti Goldstone who has spent the last nine years building an incredible garden at the Horace Mann Elementary School in Northwest D.C. Her group started with jack hammers and backhoes, digging up asphalt and concrete to make room for garden beds.

School gardens face special challenges since they're on vacation for much of the prime growing season. Still, Marti and her science teaching partner Louise Hill have managed to keep the garden growing year after after and now have integrated food preparation into the scheme, not an easy trick either when your school has no cooking facilities. But Marti says they may have licked that problem as well--plans for a small kitchen are on the drawing board.


We were experiencing a short heat wave this weekend and that brought all kinds of visitors to the garden. Some are starting their gardening at a very early age. Maybe we are looking at the garden teachers of the future.

--Posted by Ed Bruske

Teaching Teachers to Make Salad

Since building a large container garden at my daughter's charter school two years ago I've been involved in teaching kids how to prepare fresh produce as well as working with an organization that helps other teachers start gardens at their own schools.

School gardens expose children to healthy, locally grown food and can be used to teach all sorts of skills, including science, reading, math and art. But getting school gardens off the ground and maintaining them present a number of challenges. Not least of these is the fact that most schools are on vacation during the summer, the peak growing season in most areas of the country.

That's why I emphasize salad and other greens in the school gardening scheme. Cool weather crops such as leaf lettuce, arugula, mizuna, cress and mache can be planted in March or April and harvested before the school year is over. To those you can add radishes and carrots. The carrots might not be ready till fall. Or, in our case, you can plant carrots in the fall and be harvesting them in spring. Fall is a good time to plant a second round of salad.

Yesterday was our annual teacher workshop with D.C. Schoolyard Greening, the organization I work with. I presided over the salad clinic, where I gave my best pitch for growing salads and also passed along some of the lessons I've learned working with groups of children.

* Avoid taking large groups of children into the garden by yourself. Focus and control become issues when kids are released to the outdoors. I try to have at least one other adult with me, and work with two or three kids at a time planting seeds or harvesting. There need to be specific rules of behavior in the garden.

* Kids love harvesting and preparing vegetables. Planting seeds takes no more than a few minutes. But you can occupy children for hours turning lettuce into salad. They will fight for a chance to wash the lettuce and crank it dry in the salad spinner. I prefer to plant leaf lettuces rather than heading lettuces. Leaf lettuces grow fast, and they produce more leaves when you cut them.

* Teach kids basic kitchen safety. An important lesson is placing a kitchen towel under the cutting board to keep it from moving. An unstable cutting surface leads to injuries.

* Young children in my classes use plastic knives, which are good enough to cut things like carrots and radishes. But vegetables should lie flat for cutting. Chasing a radish around the cutting board is dangerous. Instead, cut it in half lengthwise to create a flat surface. It can then be sliced without moving. I usually slice carrots into sticks before giving them to children to cut into dice.

* Kids love working with simple tools. They will occupy themselves for hours with a vegetable peeler or a box grater. To peel a carrot, I teach them to work on one half of the carrot first, then flip the carrot around to peel the other half. This makes the work go faster and reduces the risk of fingertips getting cut.

* Making vinaigrette is a good way to teach fractions as well as the concept of an emulsion. A classic vinaigrette consists of three parts oil to one part vinegar. Here's a simple recipe for a honey-mustard vinaigrette:

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon honey
generous pinch coarse salt
pinch ground pepper
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

In a bowl, whisk together mustard, honey, salt, pepper and vinegar. Add a drop or two of olive oil and whisk vigorously until the olive oil is completely incorporated. Add remaining olive oil and whisk until vinaigrette is smooth and homogeneous. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. If it seems too sharp, whisk in more olive oil.

Pass the bowl around so the kids can take turns using the whisk. They will not tire of it. Pretty soon you will have kids loving the salad they made themselves.

--Posted by Ed Bruske

Glover Community Garden in the Post - all season long

Adrian Higgins' article in today's Washington Post brings some really exciting news.  In it he introduces us to the Glover Park Community Garden in N.W. Washington, D.C., and to a few of its gardeners.  And the best part is that Higgins will be checking in with them via video every month throughout the season, so we'll be "Following a Growing Drama, with Many Plots".  The main characters are the wiseguy chairman of the garden, some young but experienced gardeners, and a total newbie.  This is our kind of reality show - and how cool is that?

Higgins and the Post deserve a big rave for this terrific idea.  Watch the first installment.

Posted by Susan Harris

More on D.C. Compost

In fact, there is a municipal compost pile in the District of Columbia. It's about twice the size of the bulk pile at American Plant Food in Bethesda. But never has there been a compost heap more difficult to find or better hidden from public view.

This pile is located behind (on the north side) of the Public Works vehicle lot and trash collection facility at New Jersey Avenue and K Street SE. This is in close proximity to the new baseball park, surrounded by scruffy commercial and utility operations of one kind or another, just off the Southeast-Southwest Expressway, South Capitol Street and the railroad tracks. In stunning contrast, there are also brand new condominium high-rises opening just across the street.

Coming from Northwest D.C., I took the I-395 tunnel under the mall to the expressway going east and exited on 6th Street SE. I turned left when I should have turned right. I think if you turn right on 6th Street and follow it to K, you can make another right and go four blocks to the Public Works lot.

What you will find there is a fantastic assortment of dump trucks, snow plows, street cleaners and salt spreaders, as well as many dozens of private vehicles. There is hardly a human being to be found. The place to enter is off 2nd Street at K. You will be facing two very imposing ramps, one going up and to the left into the trash dumping area (a smoke stack towers overhead), the other going down into a dark and somewhat scary parking area. Take the down ramp, through the garage to the other side of the building.

When you emerge back into the light, you have to make a 180-degree turn to the right, around a line of parked vehicles and back along the north side of the building. You will see piles of sand, shredded wood and compost in the background. The compost is all the way in the rear.

Unfortunately, a front-end loader was blocking the drive into the compost area. I had to take my 1997 Toyota Corolla somewhat "off road" to get back there. But I did find the compost. It's compost alright, although littered with bits of plastic, bottle caps and other trash. The city apparently does not make much effort to screen the compost.

I found the piles after locating two employees who were testing a street washing machine. They invited me to "take all you want," although the city's website says there's a limit of 3 30-pound bags per customer. Does that apply to the mulch and the sand as well? There are no signs posted.

To get home, I followed K Street back to 3rd Street SE, where there's a ramp onto the expressway west-bound.

Compost, shredded wood mulch and sand are located on the north side of the building

There is lots of plastic debris in the compost

But this is genuine compost. Where it comes from and how often it is replenished is still to be learned.

Perfectly usable mulch of shredded wood

Also sand for your gardening needs.

I filled most of a small trash can with compost.0

D.C. Doesn't Compost

If you are one of the many gardeners in the District of Columbia wondering where you can get hold of municipal compost, you needn't wonder any more. It doesn't exist. The District of Columbia does not compost.

You know all the leaves the city picks up in the fall? Well, it seems to depend what year it is where they end up. In the past, they usually went to a landfill. In recent years, the city has been experimenting with compost options, sending some of the leaves to Oak Hill, MD, site of the District's juvenile detention facility. Some of the leaves apparently have recently been going to Pogo Organics outside Olney, MD, but officials were unable to say whether leaves taxpayers are paying to dispose of are turning up in that compost Pogo is selling in the handy 5-gallon buckets at Whole Foods.

In the works we are told is a possible composting enterprise in conjunction with the University of the District of Columbia at a facility in Belltsville, MD. But as of today, you cannot obtain compost from the District.

All this comes via William Howland, the city's Public Works director, who was invited to speak on the subject of recycling last night at a meeting of the Chevy Chase Citizens Association.  Barbara Baldwin, a founding member of D.C. Urban Gardeners, arranges these Chevy Chase garden events. They are always spot on.

According to Howland, all of the District's trash goes to a landfill outside Fredericksberg, VA.  Recycled items, meanwhile, are sent to a processing center in Columbia, MD. Only recently, Howland said, has it become cheaper for the city to dispose of recycled goods than general trash. The city now pays $60 per ton to dispose of trash, compared to $16 a ton for recyclables. Most of the difference, he said, is due to the rising value of aluminum cans.

Yet there doesn't seem to be any urgency on the city's part to start composting. Most jurisdictions are desperate to compost the organic portion of their trash, such as kitchen scraps, because it can constitute up to 30 percent of the waste stream. Some jurisdictions even give away compost bins to encourage citizens to turn their garbage into soil amendment. Howland was unable to say how much of the city's trash consists of compostable organic matter. Nor is there any plan to compost it.

Howland looked genuinely stricken when it was pointed out that you can order compost delivered to your garden in the District from the City of College Park, MD, where they do take composting seriously.

Really, isn't it time the nation's capitol gets with the program?

--Posted by Ed Bruske

Organic lawn care on the radio

Listen up!  Kojo Nnamdi'sinterview with Safelawns.org crusader Paul Tukey should be required listening for everyone who tends a patch of lawn. Here's the link.

Posted by Susan Harris

Approved D.C. Master Gardener Projects

Trainees in the D.C. Master Gardener program must perform 50 hours of volunteer service at an approved garden site in order to receive their Master Gardener certification. Here is the list of gardens currently included in the program. If you have a school garden or other garden project that you believe deserves to be on the list, contact D.C. Cooperative Extension Service Agent Sandy Farber, who administers the Master Gardener program. She can be reached at (202) 274-7166 or  sfarber@udc.edu.

--Posted by Ed Bruske

COOPERATIVE EXTENSION SERVICE

UNIVERSITY OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

4200 Connecticut Avenue, NW * Washington, DC 20008

StateplaceDistrict of Columbia   

(202) 274-7115 Fax (202) 274-7130

      Master List

      Approved Master Gardener 2008 Volunteer Projects

Ward 1

Bancroft Elementary School

      Contact: Iris Rothman, Bancroft Garden Coordinator (202) 265-4173

      Nancy Huvendick, Bancroft Garden Volunteer - (202) 745-3745 x 15

      1755 Newton Street, NW

      Washington, DC 20010

      Email: rothmani@powermap.net or nhuvendick@21csf.org

Volunteer opportunities: Bancroft Elementary School is in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, DC. It is a DC Public School with a Spanish language program. Volunteer hours requested for installation of plants, pruning, mulching, and weeding of existing gardens.

Kalorama Recreation Center

      Contact: John Borges, Site Manager (202) 673-7606

      1875 Columbia Road NW

      Washington, DC

      Volunteer Opportunities: park beautification projects

Trash Can Composting

Here's our friend Matt shredding grass and leaves in a trash can to make compost. For you suburbanites out there this may be totally unnecessary: You have a big back yard in which to construct your composting system.

But for us city folk, ingenious steps must be devised to compost in small spaces, especially to keep our kitchen scraps away from the local rats.

Garbage cans are a bit smaller than what the composting experts describe as the minimum size for an "optimum" compost pile. That would be three feet wide, three feet deep and three feet tall. But in fact compost will happen anywhere, even in a crack in the sidewalk. You can bag leaves in the fall and come back in a couple of years and even those bagged leaves will be turning into compost, the ideal amendment for our organic vegetable beds.

When a neighborhood learning center near my home--the Emergence Community Arts Collective--asked me to teach a course in composting that would result in actual compost, I proposed the trash can method. Teachers at one of the local schools employ several trash cans to turn their garden debris into compost. There's plenty written about it on the internet.

I had the arts collective procure a metal trash can (tougher for the rats to get into--I hear they are often available on Craig's List). I came by and drilled a series of drainage holes in the bottom, then more holes around the sides of the can for aeration. After watching my Power Point presentation on the hows and whys of composting, a small group of eager composters went to work in the yard, filling bags with last year's leaves and pulling as much green grass as we could find.

A good compost requires a proper balance of "green" materials, such as grass clippings, and "brown" materials, such as fallen leaves. They aren't always available exactly when you want them. Sometimes it pays to store leaves over the winter for a time when enough grass clippings become available to create the right mix. But if you poke around the neighborhood, you often will find old leaves waiting to be collected in an alley or blown into a pile against a fence. Kitchen scraps and coffee grounds from the local barista also make for good compost. Composting is a good way to recycle your newspaper or shredded personal documents as well.

The students were amazed to see how the bags of leaves they collected reduced to very little when we shredded them with our electric weed whacker in the trash can. We used the line trimmer just like a hand-held blender, plunging it into the leaves and moving it this way and that. We collected more leaves. And more leaves. And more leaves. And since we didn't have a mower, we collected the grass by hand and shredded that as well.

When it was all done, our trash can was a little more than half full, about equal parts chopped leaves and grass for a quick-acting compost. One of the students had brought some shredded paper, another had a bag of kitchen scraps. We mixed that in as well, then added a couple of large pitchers of water until our mix was just damp, about the wetness of a wrung-out sponge.

"By tomorrow, this compost will be hot," I assured the class. I knew that bacteria quickly would begin to feast on the nitrogen in the grass clippings, multiplying like crazy and raising the temperature of the heap. My students looked dubious. But this morning I visited the site. The ambient temperature is 40 degrees--just eight degrees above freezing--but inside the trash can, things are already toasty.