A Blood Giving Gardener

I talked with a hard working man yesterday, sweating and toiling in a community garden. He seemed to want to talk. It was ok, I listened while I took photos of the interesting plants in his plot and others.

He was slim, wore a baggy t-shirt that said he had given blood and a floppy canvas hat. He was hammering a pine 2"X2"' into the ground to replace some rotten fence posts that held up thin rusty wire that surrounded his plot. He told me he couldn't see cutting down 3,000 year old redwoods so he could have a fence post that lasted 10 years instead of 5. I admired that.

He first showed me a passion fruit plant. It looked totally wild, unkept and the long vines grew over other plants he had somewhat staked out. He picked up a small shiny yellow passion fruit that smelled delicious and handed it to me. I carried it in the palm of my hand and kept smelling it.

Next he showed me a large cotton plant - it had huge brown/black cotton balls. Several had exploded their fluffy white interiors. He said he was out at the Salton Sea with a bird watching group some years ago and picked up the seeds from farm crops in the Imperial Valley. He spread the seeds and now he has several large cotton plants. He said the thick heavy branches grow at different angles every year. This year is pointing up.

In a corner of his plot was a broken wooded framework with half dead vines. He said it was his vineyard . . . that he got 5 bunches of grapes off it in the past several years . . . that the grapes grew so close together in the bunches that insects got inside and ruined just about all of them though. I could see no organization at all to his garden - he had plants dead, dying and alive everywhere. He proudly counted his 5 tiny kale plants. To me they looked just like the dozens and dozens of tiny weeds starting to sprout in the small haphazardly raised area.

As we talked, a yellow tail butterfly flitted close and landed on a dwarf orange bush. We were both amazed as the very large butterfly touched down, twisted her body and deposited about 6 tiny light green eggs on the tip of a leaf. He said he heard they would do that, but has never witnessed it. He said he would probably cut off the leaf and keep it in a jar to see who would hatch.

He showed me a thick long spider web that used to drape across the entrance to his garden. When it was hot and he had to visit everyday to water (and break the web), the spider finally found another part of his garden and stretched a new web. We followed one of the long strands and found the huge fuzzy brown spider crouched inside a curled leaf.