Everybody starts at the beginning. Let’s start at the end.We were driving down a residential street on a Tuesday afternoon when we came upon this local producer unassumingly at work.
She had a card table stocked with lemonade and a package of chocolate chip cookies. In interest of encouraging small-scale enterprise, Juan bought four cups of lemonade from her. While we drank the first two, she asked us if we lived in the neighborhood. We said no, we had just come from visiting the farm at the end of the street.
“Oh,” she said, “you mean the big mansion?
”Well,” we said, “yes.
“They have a pool,” she said. “We used to go swimming there.”
Juan asked her if she’d ever been to visit the garden at the big mansion. She said no.
Now, let’s Tarantino it back to earlier in the afternoon when we left the Link, bound for the inner recesses of National City. The tree-laced avenues there are anchored by stalwart Victorian-era residences, with the overlay of bland three-bed-and-a-baths characteristic of San Diego’s older suburbs. But where East 26th Street hairpins back on itself, a graciously proportioned house stands at the top of a slope, dark in the shade of king palms, conifers and orange trees. The hillside is dense with plantings, a jungle coaxed into gentle order by Martha Prusinkas, who has been the property’s caretaker for the last seventeen years.
The erstwhile home of John and Christy Walton, known as the ICF Center or as the “big mansion”
The house is the former home of descendants of the Walton family (of Wal-Mart fame, not television). When the Waltons’ son contracted leukemia, Martha turned the property into an organic garden to assist in his fight for survival. When the Waltons left the area in 2006, they donated the property to the International Community Foundation Center in interest of preserving Martha’s work.
Broccoli greens tower over red bok choy, French intensive-style)
Seedlings, doing their thing
Martha practices the French intensive planting method, which means banking the beds high and seeding them thickly with two or three complementary crops. She builds three-foot hummocks of compost from straw, organic waste, and unmentionables culled from a local dairy farm. Her chickens–or, as she calls them, her “girls”–get busy among the spreading bushes of nasturtiums. She eschews the use of plastic on her soil, and employs biodynamic planting practices, which essentially means respecting the natural growing seasons and not forcing, say, cucumbers in winter.
The ICFC works as a fundraiser for community initiatives, primarily in southern California and Mexico. Amy Carsensten, one of the foundation’s directors, explained their goals for the garden, as it is now and as it will be. The garden supplies produce for the UCSD Cancer Center’s Healing Foods program, and it also serves as a hands-on site for local schoolkids to come and play in the dirt while learning about the life sciences. Martha pointed out that she was leaving one overgrown bed to be pulled up by a group of fourth-graders who will kick off the field trip season this week.
Amy Carsensten, left, with Martha Prusinkas
On the other side of the big mansion, bulldozers are breaking ground to prepare for a children’s garden and learning center. The inspiration for this project came from the Edible Schoolyard founded by Linkery muse Alice Waters, and it’s slated for completion in 2012. They are also lobbying for the use of the National City golf course to expand their growing potential and meet the district’s goal of devoting more municipal space to community food sources.
Plans for Olivewood Garden, a children’s learning center for science, nutrition and good times
In a couple of years, kids like our lemonade vendeuse will not only know the garden is there, but will get to work on it themselves, and then eat what they are learning. For we must confess that her lemonade tasted a little heavy on the MSG. Publicly, we applaud her enterprising spirit, but privately, we feel that “homemade” ought to mean something more to a kid than “I dissolved this package of yellow powder by hand.” In a few years, she could be squeezing juice from lemons, one by one, that she pushed into the ground as seeds, one by one. That’s the idea, and it’s a good one.
Martha sent us home with a bag of dried Turkish figs (which we ate on the way), some broccoli, some lemons, and a Tahitian squash of epic proportions, which you probably consumed last weekend in the Link’s creme brulee. Look for more of the ICFC Garden’s produce on the menu in the coming months, and get involved with their classroom-building effort. Fact: stuff tastes better that was planted by smart kids.
Martha’s girls, kicking it on the compost pile
Black lacinato kale, with the chicken coop in the background
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The house seen from E26th Street, with the orange grove
Che,
What a great post. As I was reading it you really re-created the whole experience for me. I enjoyed every bit of that day with you as well as the post. Keep blogging.