Welcome to the Maze Garden, a sun-filled niche on the corner of 3rd and New Streets in Southside Bethlehem. This season a community formed around the gardens’ growing to fill the raised beds with vegetables and the space with conversation, laughter, parties, and music.
Of course community isn’t just a place you can visit. It is an active connection that, to be healthy, must be lived and renewed all the time. However, some places provide more fertile ground for the growth of community than others. Gardens and green spaces are typically more inspirational than the concrete jungle and the work of cultivating the Maze garden brought many lives together.
Designed by Lehigh University students and students at a Banana Factory summer art program, the garden contains a central pond, a maze of raised beds, and an outer cradle of perennial beds. This summer we brought this framework to life.
We started veggie seeds in a farmer friend’s greenhouse in March and then incubated the baby plants in Lehigh’s greenhouse. The vegetables we grew included sungold cherry tomatoes and Cherokee purple tomatoes; greens including red Russian kale, orach, spinach, collards, chard, bok choi and lettuces; hot and sweet peppers; eggplant, okra; beans; peas; corn; radishes; onions; and garlic. In early spring we planted perennial, edible species like pawpaw (a fruit-tree also known as the Michigan Banana), elderberry, high-bush blueberry, sweet crab apple, and strawberry. A grower east of Hellertown helped us fill in our herb wheel and southern beds with mint, echinacea, thyme, sage, parsley, nasturtium, hyssop, calendula, elecampane, and oregano.
From March until mid-November we held Thursday afternoon work parties to plant, harvest, weed, mulch, build, and more. Every Friday morning we took our harvest from the previous evening to the New Bethany Ministries Soup kitchen on West 3rd Street. Every First Friday (weather-permitting) we hosted a garden party that featured potluck food, the tunes of a neighborhood old-school DJ, presentations by community groups like the Lehigh Valley Food Co-op, hula-hoopers, and break-dancers.
We in the Maze garden community are inspired by the principles of permaculture, a system of perennial agriculture developed from the wisdom of traditional cultures and ecological ethics and design. We believe that Bethlehem needs a healthy green infrastructure to restore torn ecological and social fabric. A thriving a network of gardens should be at our community’s heart.
No comments:
Post a Comment