Degrassing and Recycling

Here you will find our first Photo Essay, by Judith O’Grady.

I live where the city ends and the suburbs begin in what I call ‘a little urban farm’ which looks like this:

Although I admit that for a far-too-great portion of the year it actually looks like this:

I am a fervent proselytizer of de-grassing single-house yards, planting usable or native species in apartment building planters and foundation gardens, and sneak-planting natives and trees in uncultivated parkland.

I also am a found-object artist (meaning that I make things out of junk) and a general preacher of non-polluting and recycling. That’s my introduction.

Quite some years ago my son had an Ikea bunkbed. It could be a couch or a double on the bottom and twin on top.

After he moved out and his brother used the bunk until it got too rickety we took it apart and made it a part of the garden hardscape. The two sides make a moon-ish gate next to the hedge:

Every Summer

we set up a container garden in the top half of the driveway (the only really sunny part) and the under-mattress frame, propped on grow-bags and augmented with bath-toy frog containers from the thrift store, grows vining annuals:

The rails, both short and tall, easily become fences:

Both we and the city compost our waste,

we catch and reuse our rainwater, we store up reusable wood and containers, we have a push mower for the scraps of grass left— mostly paths from one enclosure to another. Very little grass because of the de-grassing that has been ongoing for years.

That starts with one little box:

And then you decide to make it bigger.

It becomes a crusade:

You lay out the plan of boxes,

build them, cover the grass inside them with thick paper (that’s how you ‘de’ the grass) and fill the boxes with your dirt (the dirt is visible in the background of the ‘enlarged box’ photo),

(boxes done)

being sure to take some breaks along the way:

I only grow a tiny bit of vegetables (must have some home tomatoes);

our yard is fairly dark and North-facing. My bigger interests are naturalizing, supporting wildlife, guerrilla planting trees, and growing what medicinal plants will grow here in Cold Land.

And, yes, you will likely get in trouble with the by-law sometime while you are doing this, but that problem decreases as time passes and Milkweed switches from ‘toxic weed’ to ‘support Monarch butterflies’. We’ve weathered those storms:

I took an old political yard sign,

turned it inside-out and encouraged the people walking by on their way to run their dogs at the park to bother the by-law and my ward representative. Oddly, since ours is the only really completely ungrassed yard around, many people did and told us about it as they and their dogs went past.

The little sign next to the by-law challenge is a certification by the Canadian Wildlife Society that the yard is wildlife-friendly, for which you need a water feature:

If you sit quietly a little ways away you can watch the small beings sipping and bathing and having a great time.

So that’s what I do.

The point of this essay, apart from pushing for everyone with a yard to degrass and plant useful things, is to demonstrate that I have made a start already in preparation for a projected New World that may come into being when the Pandemic is over. Although I’m not setting up as the best EcoWarrior ever (I use a clothes dryer  and eat meat) but I have some archaic skills:

Growing plants,

Darning socks,

Patching clothes,

Cooking from scratch, to name a few.

When (finally, eventually) the Pandemic is ‘over’ life will not go back to normal, normal being defined as ‘what it was before’.

Many people have and will have died. Shelf-stockers and check-out clerks have been classified as essential workers.... I see them as unwilling sacrifices myself. In the country at the top of the Coved-19 list those people do not make a living wage, do not have sick days, and if they stay at home anyway and lose their jobs they will no longer have the meagre health insurance they might have had if they even had benefits before. They will have knowingly risked their lives and possibly died for the convenience of people who don’t have to worry about how they will pay their rent and buy groceries.

Perhaps, as the right-wing hopes,

things won’t change much. But (I have a life-long interest in Medieval history) after the Black Death there were so few serfs left that the system of landed gentry with their farm labourers tied to the land (essentially slaves), the system that had looked like it was set in place forever, crumbled and collapsed as those who had been serfs started collective bargaining for better wages and benefits.

Although fat-cat industrialists do not generally read history

they all understand union-busting. They will fight back to retain their billions and, as well, the people who start up domestic industries to produce ‘made in our country’ goods will have to pay their workers a living wage. People in China, etc can be locked in their factories working to pay off insurmountable created debt but it won’t fly with the people down the street. Both of these responses make prices rise.

Perhaps there will be no more disposable cheap clothing.

Perhaps food from far away will no longer be affordable. I do know that all of the local gardening get-advice-and-brag Facebook groups I belong to have had an enormous uptick in people wanting to join and introducing themselves as utter novices. People are looking ahead to food insecurity. Many people have had the new-to-them idea that those old-timey skills lasted and were passed down because they were useful, even necessary.

If the economic adjustment and the drive to be more local and less global in our consumption does make clothes more expensive; those skills of making our own, re-sizing, patching, repairing, and darning will become valuable in a way that merely having the latest tech does not.

Growing and sharing food is a sensible answer to food becoming scarce,

expensive, or just being undependable. My yard is too dark and full of trees to grow more than a few symbolic tomatoes and some beans and peas. But I can grow native and cold-hardy perennial herbs (mostly useful, resilient, and possibly pretty ‘weeds’) who are much less dictatorial about their requirements.

I have a good collection of non-internet-dependant books of advice and recommendations on how those ‘medicinal herbs’/weeds were used before technological medicine created antibiotic resistant diseases and life-but-not-mind extending drugs.

As long as the water stays clean,

and I am very lucky to live in a city where the water comes from a local source and not from a different country, I can make elixirs, cough drops, tisanes, and syrups. And, if I can find someone who keeps a hive or two of bees, I can make salves, creams, and ointments. And trade with people in my area who have archaic skills and sunnier yards. Or I can pass on the care of the garden/farm to a younger and more able apprentice and trade darning socks, mending, and resizing for fresh vegetables and green-space snared rabbits. My present apprentice, if we both come out the other side, is also a good bread-maker and I was taught to make pie crust up to my father’s exacting standards. Right now is the time to be learning a hobby that isn’t eating out and recreational shopping.

Perhaps, in the end,

people will judge, respect, and listen to other people who have skills, or who act for the good of others, or have clear vision and good advice, rather than judging people by how much money they and their families have hoarded or by the goods they possess. There have been civilizations based on sharing economy before and perhaps there will be again.

Final note:

I have many photos of our gardening process (as you have seen) but when I shifted over to didactics I didn’t want to suddenly have no pictures to go with the rant. So I put in some of the useful things growing in my yard.

First, Apple blossoms. As we have already discovered while in pandemic isolation,  something that lifts your spirits whether art, music, or flowers is as necessary as food. 

After, the crab-apples that result from them. Indispensable as a natural source of pectin to make jams and jellies.

Then, Elder flowers. Cordial, fritters, wine— very useful and helpful. 

After, Elder berries that make a prop-you-up cold fighting syrup,  jam, and fruit for baked goods.

Finally, Dandelions. Jam and wine as well as a medicinal tonic.

You can’t cover all the ramifications of a new and different world in one essay; these are just a few ideas. I could also write about religious and magical practices, talking to the local ecosystem, and planting nut and fruit trees now as a guerrilla and perhaps afterwards as a contribution to what will become the commons. 

It’s on everyone who comes out the other side to make a better world.

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JUDITH O’GRADY

is an elderly Druid (Elders are trees, neh?) living on a tiny urban farm in Ottawa, Canada. She speaks respectfully to the Spirits, shares her home and environs with insects and animals, and fervently preaches un-grassing yards and repurposing trash (aka ‘found-object art’).

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