ISSUE #34.25 • SPECIAL SECTION •

Getcha hands in the dirt!

Here’s some help.

PISTILS NURSERY
IMAGE: Jenna Biggs

BY LANCE KRAMER, KELLY CLARKE, JEREMY GILLICK & SARAH SMITH | 503-243-2122

[April 30th, 2008]

Take one cruet of peak-oil angst and two level-headed scoops of Michael Pollan. Add a dash of Bush-Cheney bitters and a gentle sprinkle of Barbara Kingsolver’s light carbon footprint, just to balance out the sour and sweet.

Mix it up, and you get a peculiarly potent homegrown food movement germinating on parking strips, porches, back yards and balconies in Portland.

Of course, Stumptown has always been a giant nurse tree for hort heads. Where else do thousands of people line up before a spring plant sale (May 3-4) like crazed rock groupies? And how many cities have a drill team of master gardeners prancing through downtown, performing a soil-fertility ritual with rakes (Starlight Parade, May 31)?

We have the gay gardening community and the Gaia gardening community, and we all boogie down at the benefit VeggieBall (May 17) to produce some juice for Growing Gardens, the most danceable urban gardening nonprofit in town.

So the succulent seeds of the eat-local trend couldn’t have fallen on more fertile ground. Once you’re leaning locavore, the next delectable ZIP code appears ever closer to home. And pretty soon, you become a backdoor-avore.

“What could be more local than that, your own back yard?” says Josh Kirschenbaum, product development coordinator for Territorial Seed Co., based in Cottage Grove, which offers many compact container-friendly vegetables and even a petite blueberry bush.

Natural gardening expert Carl Grimm (the dapper red pepper at last year’s inaugural VeggieBall) has seen his series of Metro workshops with local garden aficionados and chefs, called the Gardens of Eatin’, fill up weeks early this year despite an expanded schedule.

“It feels like there’s this food heartbeat that’s just getting stronger, certainly in Portland, but even in the suburbs, too,” he says. “There’s more of a buzz about growing food.”

Here are some insider tips on resources to lend fizz and fulfillment to your experiments in growing vegetables and fruit in eco-kindly ways.