Learning from the Land

Emily Swartz picks ripe tomatoes from the vegetable garden at Greyrock Commons. (Photo by Doug Swartz)

Year One

We waved goodbye – and good riddance – to the last of the construction trucks. For more than a year the vehicles had used for their staging area what the architects had neatly labeled the "community garden" on our blueprints. Dump trucks, pick-up trucks, 18-wheel delivery trucks, piles of lumber, stacks of pipes and industrial-size garbage dumpsters had squatted on our scraped dirt field during the building of our community. Now they were gone and we could begin to reclaim the land.

Long ago, before the farmers arrived in this part of Colorado, our field was part of the vast shortgrass prairie that runs up to the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Later, after settlers figured out how to channel water from the wet mountains down to the dry plains, the field became, in succession, an apple orchard, a sugar beet farm and a plot for feed corn. By the time we bought the land, the field had become a scratchy pasture of grass and weeds. With a little imagination we could squint at the hard-packed acre of mud, which flung stray particles of dirt into our eyes whenever the wind blew, and see our own cohousing Eden.

Here, the wind sweeps down from Wyoming like a flash-flood of dusty air. In the spring, when young plants are the most vulnerable, it tears roof shingles from their moorings and mercilessly whips about any plant higher than short buffalo grass or less resilient than stiff-spined yuccas. I know every gardener claims that she battles the worst of the weather and soil wherever she happens to spade, but this land truly is a hard place to garden. Between the wind and the hail, the early frosts and the late thaws, the locusts and the flea beetles, and the floods and the droughts, gardening here is no game for the easily defeated. But I'm getting ahead of my story so let me return to our first spring at Greyrock Commons.

That spring was a wet one. (How sweet that sounds now as I write this after two harsh years of drought.) Back then we cursed the rain that delayed our progress in landscaping around our houses. We all wore rubber boots – the kind you see on farmers or ditch maintainers – to make the muddy trek from our homes to the common house. We had so much other work to do that we decided not to plant gardens in the field that first season. Instead we planted grass seed, installed a ditch-fed irrigation system and tended to other parts of the landscaping.

Completely ordinary natural events became benchmarks of our progress. During construction, our site had been rendered so lifeless that all work stopped one day as we marveled at finding something living – a snake crawling across the dirt. We were amazed when the field sprouted short nubs of green and when the first bird – I think it was a magpie – lit on a neighbor's roof. Another time we celebrated when someone discovered an earthworm in his front yard. Worms were so uncommon that summer that one resident bought a bucket of fishing worms and anointed our common green with them.

Year Two

During the second winter, a group of us met to plan our first garden. We asked Dennis, a local organic farmer, to help us get started. We wanted to know what sorts of soil amendments we needed, which mulch and seed varieties he thought we should use, and what were his sources for materials. We needed practical, ready-to-use suggestions that would turn our field of grass into the garden of our dreams.

We knew Dennis had some unusual views on farming. He ran a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm that was supported by subscribers who paid a lump sum of cash at the start of the growing season in return for brown paper sacks stuffed with each week's harvest. What we didn't know was just how esoteric his advice would sound. He told us about the ineffable vibrations of moonbeams and the spiritual essences of rain. “Listen to the land,” he said. “Sleep on it, taste its dirt and breathe in its aura. Pay attention and it will tell you how to live.”

One neighbor planted hearty sunflowers that grew eight-feet-tall. (Photo by Doug Swartz)

We at Greyrock Commons are a polite and practical bunch. We're idealistic, but in a very grounded, get-the-project-off-the-ground kind of way – necessary when getting any cohousing development built. Once it became obvious that Dennis would not be advising us about the benefits of cow versus horse manure or whether bush beans or pole beans would work better in our climate, we sat in a polite, embarrassed silence. We stared at our shoes, an odd assortment of Birkenstocks, clogs, hiking books and sneakers. We fiddled with our fingernails, bit our cheeks and tried not to roll our eyes too obviously. He was telling us to "listen to the land" when all we wanted to know was how best to grow tomatoes. Good lord! We'd had enough trouble trying to listen to each other.

So we went back to our meetings and decided to garden cooperatively. We grouped ourselves by crops. Some of us would cultivate tomatoes and others would grow beans and squash. All would share the harvest. We even made plans to distribute all the excess produce that we imagined we would reap. We ordered seeds and started them in trays in our basements. Once the soil warmed up, we rented a rotary tiller and broke ground in what was now a thriving field of grass. We were pleased and surprised at how quickly the land seemed to be healing itself. I can't remember how we chose where in the field to make our plots. I know we didn't think about it too much, because we ended up with three or four random patches of broken ground in the middle of the field of grass.

We waited to plant until after the average last frost date, just as the agricultural agent had advised. After choosing the hardiest varieties, we planted, weeded and waited. From the beginning, difficulties arose between us regarding who was taking care of what and when. The division of our labor into different crews was much more difficult than we had imagined the previous winter. As the real work of gardening began, social fissures and clashes started in our group. And then, we learned the first of many lessons that the land would teach us.

That year we had a late snow in mid-June. Colorado strikes again. The cold killed nearly everything we'd planted. I had been on vacation and returned to find that all of our tender seedlings had shriveled and turned black. The only plants not damaged by the cold front were the weeds, which soon took over the plots. We never recovered from this initial setback that year. A few of us tried replanting and tending to the plots, but not much came of it. It all seemed so daunting by then – not only the unpredictable weather but also the complexity of working together. And we still needed to complete other landscaping work around the community. For the garden, there was always next year.

Year Three

After the abysmal failure of our first attempt at gardening, we decided to restructure. What that means in a cohousing community is more meetings. We wanted to develop a plan, but first we needed to set strategies and priorities and to reach consensus on them. We created a list of all the components we wanted in our garden: grapevines and strawberries, pumpkin patches and pergolas, pathways and meeting places. We held a design competition – members could pick a plat of the garden and draw their vision of what it should be. We gathered a beautiful assortment of plans but could not decide on the criteria for choosing one. It came down to a vote. Feelings were hurt; personalities clashed.

We were now three years into our experiment of living together. Planning for the garden was just one part of a larger web of figuring out how to coexist. Cohousing, we realized, was hard to do. People began to question their commitment to community. That year we held myriad meetings and were debating endlessly to resolve other issues such as parking spaces and meal programs. And what should have been a simple, straightforward decision about planting vegetables had turned into a complex and difficult task.

We were learning from the land, but not the lessons that we had imagined. A microcosm of our community, the garden was teaching us about juggling individual needs with community needs. We learned about patience, perseverance and how to grow through conflict. We discovered that being connected makes life richer but not easier.

We compromised, reconciled differences and finally came to consensus about what to do with our plot of land. Each gardener would be free to plant what he or she wished in a 10' x 60' section bounded by four-foot paths on the north and south and five-foot paths along the east and west. In early spring, we rented a rotary tiller, bought a huge pile of mulch and laid out the grid as a team. It felt good to be working and sweating together after a winter of contentious meetings. By the end of our last workday, the garden was a checkered quilt of tilled soil and full of potential.

The gardeners then went to work on their individual plots. Each section was distinct. One neighbor hauled an antique metal baby crib to grow her peas on and another gardener grew eight-foot-tall mammoth sunflowers. One gardener mulched with hay, another with shredded leaves. The water in our ditch flowed that season and there was no late frost. We battled bugs and weeds but neither overwhelmed us.

By the end of the summer, our gardens had grown lush with corn, peas, tomatoes, beans, onions, garlic, squash, pumpkins, melons, rhubarb, strawberries and raspberries. We knew without a doubt that we had been blessed with the fruits of our labor. The land had taught us well.