Myers Park Baptist Church Community Garden – Ed Williams

Time	Subject
0:00:07	Interview Begins
0:00:47	Foundation of the Myers Park Baptist Church Community Garden
0:01:15	Fred Allen and Ed Williams begin the garden
0:04:24	Layout of current garden (plots/beds/size)
0:04:41	HVAC problems and closure of original garden area
0:06:21	Using raised beds in the garden
0:07:42	Using a mix of seeds and seedlings
0:09:16	Joys of being outdoors and community gardening
0:10:29	Church members and volunteering
0:12:19	Watering system in the garden
0:13:02	Types of produce grown in the garden
0:14:39	Growing methods for produce
0:15:25	Pollination methods and lack of pollinator beds
0:16:13	How they fertilize the garden and keep it organic
0:16:59	Utilizing the compost system at the garden
0:18:35	Confidence in their garden and their concept of simplicity
0:19:42	Sustainability of community gardens and volunteerism in Mecklenburg County
0:20:19	Insect Infestation in the garden
0:21:29	No vandalism in garden and location of garden
0:22:49	Food Distribution to Friendship Trays
0:24:52	Cross pollination and strange fruits in the garden
0:27:41	Types of volunteer gardeners
0:28:24	Story of a neighbor sewing on strawberries
0:30:49	Volunteer base and the church community
0:31:33	Challenges of the community garden
0:33:03	Benefits of Community Gardening
0:37:42	Future of community gardening
0:41:16	Final words about community gardening
0:43:33	Interview Ends

[00:00:07]

>> Savannah: Hello, my name is Savannah Brown, and today I’m interviewing Ed Williams. The date is Friday, March 29th, 2019, the time is 1 o’clock PM. We are interviewing in Charlotte, North Carolina. And today we will be discussing the Myers Park Community Garden and Ed’s involvement with the organization in tending of the garden.

[00:00:26]

The garden donates fresh produce to Friendship Trees, a non-profit organization that delivers meals to the elderly in [INAUDIBLE] communities located throughout Macklenburg County. So my first question is kind of a two part. Can you tell me a little bit about the history of the garden, kind of how long it’s been in operation, and then when did you become involved?

[00:00:48]

>> Ed Williams: Well, the idea for the garden has been around since the Garden of the Eden [LAUGH].

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: We have a group at our church that’s very interested in environmental matters and they meet and talk about good ideas. And they’ve been talking for some years about doing a vegetable garden.

[00:01:08]

And it’s a kind of place where good ideas go and they sit there like the library until somebody comes and checks them out. So Fred Allen is a doctor who lived in the neighborhood of the church, and I decided instead of talking about it this year, we’d just plant some stuff and see what happens.

[00:01:27]

So we were kind of ready plant a, and we didn’t know exactly where we were going, but we figured if we got the plants in the ground, they knew what to do. And this was, I don’t know, five years ago, six years ago. You have the dates and some of the material I gave you.

[00:01:42]

It was just the two of us and we decided we would do it at no expense to the church. So we went around to people members of the church and raised money to build some raised beds. I think we started with eight or ten raised beds and we wanted to do two things.

[00:01:59]

One is minimize the requirements for maintenance and the other was have really good soil. So I looked around and found this place in Gaston County that makes composted soil for gardens. And I called them and told them what we were doing and they said, well I’ll tell you what, we’ll give you all the soil you need if you’ll just pay for hauling it, so that was a great breakthrough.

[00:02:30]

And then we worked with Lowe’s and some other supply stores to get lumber and things at a reduced price and I think we wound up spending $500 or so to build all those beds, get the dirt, buy seeds and plants and get everything started. What made it possible was that Fred who lived in the neighbourhood and walked by the church every day so he could come by and do the watering which removes one of the great barriers to having a successful garden without water.

[00:03:03]

It doesn’t work and he was there every day as needed doing watering. So we planted and we watered and we got started. We had a big kickoff with the people from the church who loved the idea and kids helped plant things, all sort of stuff like that. Since we did it on a Sunday and it was essentially a no news day in the world, the local TV came out and covered it.

[00:03:32]

It was a great find and then we just did it. I paid pretty close attention to it. We had maybe four or five other members of the church who would pitch in as necessary. The routine devolved into this. Fred would take care of the watering every day in dry season, less if conditions indicated.

[00:03:55]

And we would harvest on Mondays and Thursdays and take it to Friendship Trays, our church has a long relationship with Friendship Trays. So we knew that all the stuff would be well used if we took it there. And that’s it, and then we just did that year after year [LAUGH].

[00:04:16]

>> Savannah: Thats great. Can you tell me a little bit about the garden, how many beds you have and just kinda the layout of it?

>> Ed Williams: Well, we had I think maybe 12 or so. And my wife and I were out of town and somebody sent me an email, most of it saying the garden has exploded.

[00:04:34]

[LAUGH]

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: Which I thought odd [LAUGH] But sure enough it had. A lot of the heating and air conditioning stuff that serves the Cornwall Center, the big recreation and education center next to the garden, it goes under there, and one of the pipes had broken. And it really, it looked like a volcano had erupted.

[00:04:59]

[LAUGH] The gasses and liquids and all that stuff shot up through the garden. And so the powers that be decided gee, you probably need to let us take care of this HVAC stuff and put the garden somewhere else so they moved it to the spot where it is now.

[00:05:19]

Also next to the Cornwell Center but far away from any underground [LAUGH] piping. And we have let’s see, ten beds now, four by eight each of them, again filled with wonderful garden soil.

>> Ed Williams: And,

>> Ed Williams: Water access right there, and we’ve just built a compost bin, and that’s part of the garden.

[00:05:48]

And we’ll be planting next week, and we’ll have tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, beans, cucumbers.

>> Ed Williams: Probably something else [LAUGH] that I don’t remember, and whatever else fits. I mean we’ll have three or four people involved, and each of them has something favorite they’d like to grow, so we accommodate people’s wishes pretty much.

[00:06:15]

Everything we produce will go to Friendship Trays.

>> Savannah: Can you tell me a little about why you use raised beds?

>> Ed Williams: Because you don’t have to worry about how good the soil is. In any soil around a public building that’s heavily used, there’s going to be packed [LAUGH] To a consistency that nothing would grow in.

[00:06:48]

And here, it’s gonna be clay, so it’s just messy to work with. And if you build your garden on top of that, and put in soil that you know will grow things, you don’t have to worry about preparing that soil, or anything. So that’s, as I said, one of our goals was to make it as low-maintenance as possible.

[00:07:08]

And if you get garden soil, it doesn’t come with weeds. So that can raise beds about eight inches, which is deep enough to grow everything we’re growing and we don’t have a weed problem and we don’t have a fertility problem. So the raised beds made sense for us and since we were doing it on the cheap, and got good prices on things, it worked out well.

[00:07:40]

>> Savannah: Do you plant seeds, or seedlings, or a mix of both?

>> Ed Williams: Both, tomatoes we usually plant seedlings. Squash, cucumber, beans seems to be just fine. My own personal thought is that seeds give you a healthier plant than transplanting seed lengths but the availability of so many varieties of tomatoes, it makes it tempting.

[00:08:07]

The Burpee’s catalog comes, and I begin to tremble.

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: [LAUGH] So we do both. Eggplants and peppers we’ll use Ceilings. But, as I say, you’re not talking about a bunch of money, so we just get the ones that are easiest and healthiest to her.

>> Savannah: Where do you get the seedlings?

[00:08:33]

Do people bring them or pick them up from a nursery?

>> Ed Williams: We’ve done a little bit of both. I think this year I’m gonna order them from Burpees. And then we’ll go to the hardware store over in Matthews. His name I’ve just forgotten. But it’s a wonderful Renfrow’s Hardware.

[00:08:54]

They have a wonderful arrangement of plants and they know a lot about gardening. They’re gardeners themselves and they really love it so they’re free with advice and have good prices and a wide variety of stuff. And I just like going there. [LAUGH] So there were two things we want to do.

[00:09:12]

More obviously, but two things really stood out in my mind. We wanted it to be something we could do so that it didn’t become a chore but was a joy, and we wanted it to be beautiful. [LAUGH] And so a lot of the plants we chose, we chose because, my goodness, they’re great to look at.

[00:09:32]

Eggplants, how could you beat an eggplant or a tomato? And we grew some foot long beans that people are just thrilled by to see how long they are. And we grew some foot long cucumbers last year. I don’t know really about this year. But we wanted to make it interesting.

[00:09:52]

And we have a lot of people who just stop in and look. There in the city, it’s pretty hard to do gardening unless you’re dedicated to the task. And a lot of people just enjoy being there and walking through it.

>> Savannah: Yeah, [COUGH] one of the things that’s been a theme is just the joy of being outdoors.

[00:10:13]

>> Ed Williams: Yeah.

>> Savannah: And especially the small pockets of space community gardens can create in this urban landscape.

>> Ed Williams: Yeah.

>> Savannah: Which is really nice. Is your garden for, you don’t rent out any beds?

>> Ed Williams: No.

>> Savannah: No, okay. Are most of the people working there just volunteers at your church?

[00:10:33]

>> Ed Williams: Yeah.

>> Savannah: Okay, have you had any difficulties with the volunteer base or has it been pretty steady?

>> Ed Williams: Well, gardens are pretty forgiving except for watering. If you don’t harvest, well, you’ll have to throw some stuff away, but it’s not bad, and if you harvest too early.

[00:10:51]

Well most of the stuff we’re growing, if it looks like it looks in Harris Teeter it’s time to harvest it. So it’s not really complicated, and I haven’t had any problem. We’ve depended on people who express an interest, and I’ve called on my Sunday School class at the church a few times to do stuff.

[00:11:08]

But the only real problem is organizing volunteers. I mean, there’s no shortage of people who are willing to help, but figuring out when they can be there, and when they’re needed and all that. As I say, we’re on an as-needed schedule watering, so you need somebody who is there at the appropriate time to do that.

[00:11:30]

And then we harvest on Mondays and Thursdays because that’s convenient for friendship trades. If you take a bunch of stuff on Friday, they’re closed for the weekend. They don’t reject it, but they look at you with [LAUGHS] less than a generous view. I’d say there aren’t more, if we need people for a project, building something, we can get all the people we need simply by asking through the church communications system.

[00:12:04]

But really people tend to incorporate it into their daily lives. It’s easy to get people who are going to be at the Cornwell Center for an exercise class or an educational class to spend a few minutes on the garden. So it hasn’t been a big problem.

>> Savannah: Can you tell me a little bit about the watering system?

[00:12:23]

Do you just have hoses?

>> Ed Williams: We have one hose and one faucet and one garden, [LAUGH] and that’s been fine. It’s just obvious. If things look like they need watering, you water them. The raised beds have really good drainage. So it’s not as though you’re going to drown something.

[00:12:42]

So the only real concern is that things are gonna dry out too much, and one summer they did because we just didn’t organize the watering very well and someone went on vacation. But mostly this is not highly complex scientific stuff. This is if it’s dry, water it. [LAUGH]

[00:13:02]

>> Savannah: Yeah, [COUGH] I know you told me a little bit before, so tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers. What are some of the main produce you grow in the garden? Well, one thing we brought in the past that we’re not growing this year is sweet potatoes.

>> Ed Williams: There’s a wonderful brand of variety of sweet potato called the vardaman sweet potato developed in Mississippi that we’ve had some really good luck with, and we had a couple of raised beds that were four by four feet wide and then three feet tall, so we had some depth there.

[00:13:40]

Sweet potatoes grow under the ground. So you’d put in the little sweet potato slips, they’re called, little pieces of vines with roots on them, and let them grow all summer, and you never know what’s there. And then when you harvest in the fall, sometimes you come up with a wonderous stuff.

[00:13:58]

The second year we did it, I think, my wife and I were digging up some sweet potatoes and we found one that weighed 14 pounds. And she held it up to have her picture made and it looked like a small puppy, I mean it was really huge. That was fun.

[00:14:15]

But I think we’ve got to figure out how to grow sweet potatoes again. Let’s see, I can’t remember what else is there other than what I mentioned. We usually have a couple of varieties of peppers. Usually a couple varieties of eggplants cuz they’re so gorgeous. The traditional one you see in the supermarket, plus some long Japanese eggplants that are just nice.

[00:14:39]

>> Savannah: [COUGH] Do you have a specific type of growing method, like certain vegetables first, followed by others? Or do you harvest anything in the spring, and then again in the fall? We really haven’t in the past, simply because of our commitment to keeping it simple, stupid.

>> Ed Williams: [LAUGH]

[00:14:57]

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: Cuz we figure if it’s gotta be done by volunteers, you need to make it as light a burden as you can. So we’ve tended to plant things that grow in the spring through the frost. We haven’t done much with lettuce. We haven’t done much of the quick growing things like beats, and turnips, and carrots.

[00:15:19]

We’ve just planted things that you put them in the ground, and they stay there all summer and you harvest things all season long.

>> Savannah: Yeah, do you have any pollinator beds? Any flower beds?

>> Ed Williams: No, we don’t. I wish we did. The whole problem with bee population and butterfly population is a great concern.

[00:15:36]

We have a woman in the church who has volunteered to help us do that, but we got caught up in moving the garden and haven’t done it, but that would really be nice to have something that ouldl attract butterflies and bees and all of that. And it’s easy to do, it’s not any trick.

[00:15:53]

>> Savannah: Do you have to self-pollinate any plants or the-

>> Ed Williams: No.

>> Savannah: No, okay, most of it’s just natural, yeah.

>> Ed Williams: Yeah, I mean, mostly if you plant stuff it knows what to do [LAUGH] if you keep watering it. And we try to use plants that are hearty and self-sufficient in that regard.

[00:16:11]

If they have to train us to do things they’re in trouble. [LAUGH]

>> Savannah: [LAUGH] And can you tell me a little bit about the fertilizer? I know you mentioned that in the very beginning. Or the soil that you got. I don’t know a ton about this, about organic or not organic fertilizer, so if you could speak to that.

[00:16:27]

>> Ed Williams: Well, ours is fully organic and we haven’t used any fertilizer other than compost. You could increase your yield some if you did, and I just don’t know enough about fertilizer and stuff to do it. And no one has come forward who does [LAUGH] so in keeping with our simplicity, it’s best we’ve just used very fertile soil and we supplemented it with compost.

[00:16:59]

>> Savannah: How does your compost system work?

>> Ed Williams: Well, we’re about to find out. [LAUGH] We just got this compost built by a young woman as a school project. And I think what’s gonna happen is you throw stuff in there and you let it compost, natural. We had a women in the church who wanted to do kind of aggressive composting, which involves turning stuff and all that.

[00:17:27]

And then she moved to Davidson. So we haven’t done that, we just used it to mostly throw waste from the garden. The young woman who built this compost Ben, that’s out there now, hopes to get people from the church kitchen involved in throwing coffee grounds and left over vegetable matter in there, which would speed things up, but we’ve just been content to let nature take it’s course.

[00:18:01]

>> Savannah: So the compost is fairly new, they can’t-

>> Ed Williams: Well, we had a nice compost system in the old garden. That was destroyed when the whole garden was destroyed, that had three large bins so it could shift stuff from one to another. But as I say the woman who was in there moved, so we just kinda threw stuff in there and let it compost itself.

[00:18:23]

If we were interested in efficiency and maximum productivity, there’s a lot of stuff we could do. But the fact is, we’re interested in having a project that we are confident we can do, and that people are willing to work in. That doesn’t require of anybody a great deal of expertise.

[00:18:44]

I think the danger in community garden projects is that you’ll let the perfect, the old saying, the perfect become the enemy of the good. So in seeking perfection, you neglect doing something that’s simply good, and then you find that seeking perfection is more taxing on people’s energy and interests than you’d anticipated, so we wound up with nothing.

[00:19:10]

We have a pretty good garden that gives pretty good yield and it goes to a good price, and that’s what we’ve been trying to do, and we’ve been happy with it.

>> Savannah: Yeah, I think one of the things I’ve realized as I look at community gardens is, they start with really big ideas, and then they seem to be fizzling out.

[00:19:31]

So contacting people in McCumber county about this big list of community gardens. There’s really only a handful of them that are sustainable. So that makes total sense, what you’re saying.

>> Ed Williams: Well, yeah and when you’re talking about sustainability, you’re talking not only about the garden, but about the people who run it.

[00:19:48]

You don’t wanna require too much of them, you don’t wanna wear them out, you want them to enjoy the experience. And you want the people to be, essentially, replaceable. That is, if you can’t do it, that’s okay, we can find somebody who can, cuz it’s not complicated. And I think keeping it simple has been one of the keys to our success.

[00:20:12]

>> Savannah: Have you ever dealt with an insect infestation, any kind of bug problem, or-

>> Ed Williams: Yeah, they’re nasty.

>> Savannah: [LAUGH] yeah.

>> Ed Williams: Yeah, and that’s a problem, when you’re trying to do an organic garden. We had some kind of nasty-looking, nasty-smelling weevil that would get after our squash a couple of years ago.

[00:20:33]

And at first, I was dealing with them by picking them off and squishing them, between my thumb and forefinger. [LAUGH]

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: Which was, I was not keeping up [LAUGH] with the growth of the infestation. Sometimes you just have to give up on plans. And, it’s gonna take more than you’re willing to invest in savings but there’s usually something you can plant into a space, but we haven’t had any massive infestations, no problems with tomato wilt or anything like that.

[00:21:05]

The bugs on the squash have been the big problem.

>> Savannah: Any problem with rabbits or squirrels?

>> Ed Williams: No we’re pretty lucky. We don’t have deer munching on anything, or rabbits, or squirrels, where we are.

>> Savannah: My next question is do you ever have any kind of vandalism? Anybody like littering in the garden or anything like that or it’s-

[00:21:28]

>> Ed Williams: We have people who come by and take samples, but no one’s ever done anything that seem to be at all malicious. I mean, it’s a church next to a very busy building. So you’d almost have to plot [LAUGH] to do something malicious and most people are not that mean-spirited and we haven’t had any problem with that.

[00:21:56]

>> Savannah: Nice, that’s good.

>> Ed Williams: It is.

>> Savannah: Yeah.

>> Ed Williams: But it’s not out in a really public place, either. It’s kind of tucked away around a corner of a busy building.

>> Savannah: Think that was one of the, I interviewed someone from the UNC Charlotte community garden on campus.

[00:22:11]

I think because it’s kind of a well trafficked area, it attracted some, just more options for littering, or people being in the garden a little bit more. So, that was the first time I’d ever encountered a garden having vandalism or just something wrong, so I just wanted to ask what, usually it’s squirrels or rabbits.

[00:22:33]

>> Ed Williams: Yeah, but you guys are college students, we’re more cvivilized than you are. Come on, we’re what you’re hoping to become.

>> Savannah: [LAUGH] True. [LAUGH] So, can we talk a little bit about the food distribution and what you give to Friendship Trays?

>> Ed Williams: Everything we do goes to Friendship Trays.

[00:22:51]

So we don’t have any distribution challenges. We just take it over there and they know what to do with it. As I said, we try to accommodate our schedule to theirs, so that’s the only thing. We know where it goes. As I said, we’ve had a long relationship with Friendship Trays, and a good one.

[00:23:10]

So that’s it. We’re not trying to create a new system. There’s a perfectly good system that we can fit into well. And that’s what we’ve done.

>> Savannah: How much, do you only harvest at the end, like, one harvest? No, you said you harvest on Mondays and Thursdays?

>> Ed Williams: Yeah.

[00:23:28]

>> Savannah: Okay, how much produce would you say you take overall?

>> Ed Williams: Well, let’s see, it’s in that material I sent you.

>> Savannah: Yes.

>> Ed Williams: And I’m sorry I didn’t memorize-

>> Savannah: It’s okay.

>> Ed Williams: Any of those numbers, but half a ton, or something like that, on a good year, and if there’s going to be a narrate rather than leave the space you could see how much we did.

[00:23:53]

And we had the second and the most productive year, the second most productive garden in the friendship trade system. But I don’t remember how much that was. I would have to say the first, most productive, was about ten times what we got. It was the one connected with the school.

[00:24:13]

And they really did some stuff. But we were pleased with what we were doing. It was basically then.

>> Savannah: So you don’t ever sell farmer’s markets to trees?

>> Ed Williams: No.

>> Savannah: Okay, so in the material you sent me, I did really enjoy the strange fruits.

>> Ed Williams: Yes.

>> Savannah: So can we talk a little bit about what I kind of wrote down being a gardener or a farmer sometimes comes with being a scientist a little bit.

[00:24:44]

>> Ed Williams: [LAUGH]

>> Savannah: So that cross pollination of squash and zucchini and pumpkin. So what types of surprising fruits or vegetables have you found in there?

>> Ed Williams: Well, that’s basically it. One year from our compost bins which were right next to the garden, we’d throw in a bunch of squash and stuff in there at the end of the previous growing season.

[00:25:05]

And in the spring, this vine popped out, and it just looked so vigorous, I was kind of afraid to do anything to it. And it started growing, and it grew maybe 40 feet along the driveway and the fence that was behind our garden and everything and started producing these giant squash, melon looking things.

[00:25:29]

And we didn’t know what it was. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before. And I looked up and found that there are 46 million varieties of squashes on the Internet [LAUGH].

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: So that didn’t help. So I took one of them home, and my wife cut into it to see if it was edible, I let her take the first bite.

[00:25:49]

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: And it was great. So I took some over to Friendship Trays and showed them to some of the people there and someone said, yeah, that looks like something I had in my home which is in Central America. And they started using it. And I mean, these things were growing 20 or 30 pounds.

[00:26:08]

>> Savannah: Wow.

>> Ed Williams: So that’s the year we had the fantastic production [LAUGH].

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: Nature had provided us with that edge. And I never knew what it was and the next year it came back and it was a little different. A lot of the seeds we use, if you harvest from them and use the seeds from the harvest, they won’t produce the same plant because they’re hybrids.

[00:26:35]

And I think what had happened was a couple of plants had gone back to their natural state and who knows what they did on the dark out there? At any rate, and interbred produced these wonderous miracle fruits. You know nature knows what it’s doing. It doesn’t tell us sometimes, but that’s been the nice thing about the garden.

[00:27:01]

You just don’t have to know much to grow a good garden if you got good dirt and sunlight and water. The seeds and the plants know what they’re supposed to do. And if you just let them do it, it would be all right. But you do have to make sure you’ve got the sunlight and we did so all that and particularly the water.

[00:27:22]

>> Savannah: With some of the people I’ve interviewed I’ve kind of noticed that there’s a trend with people who had past experience with gardening really enjoy it. Is that kind of, with your volunteer base, do you find that people were either their grandparents gardened or are they brand-new gardeners or a mix of both?

[00:27:41]

>> Ed Williams: It’s a mix of both. In my case, I lived in a very small town and my mother’s father was a kind of jack of all trades. If you needed a garage built, he’d build you a garage. If you needed a garden planted, he’d plant you a garden.

[00:27:57]

So he was actively involved in the garden business, and as was my family. But my experience with the garden was mostly weeding. I didn’t like that at all, so I lost interest in gardens. And then my wife and I moved here, and at first we lived in a,

[00:28:15]

>> Ed Williams: A condominium, and it had a sunny backyard, so we thought we would plant some stuff. I’ll tell you a story. We planted some strawberries. And every day I’d get home from work, we’d go out and look in the garden to see how the strawberries were doing. And one day we went out there and on what had been barren strawberry patch the day before, there were now huge red strawberries.

[00:28:41]

I thought, what on earth is that? And then we looked next door, and our neighbor who had watched us out of her kitchen window all these days was a nurse. And she had come over and sowed those strawberries [LAUGH] to the plants just for the joy of seeing us, we don’t get many miracles like that.

[00:29:00]

>> Savannah: Yeah.

>> Ed Williams: We shouldn’t have said anything maybe she’d do it again.

>> Savannah: Yeah.

>> Ed Williams: But I just kind of got interested because Earth Keepers which is this environmental organization at church that I was talking about, had been kicking around the idea of a garden. And I’d retired after many years as an editor at the Charlotte Observer and I was looking for something to do, and Fred Allen had retired from his medical practice.

[00:29:33]

>> Ed Williams: We just decided to make something happen. And once we got into it, we really, really loved it.

>> Savannah: Yeah, I mean there is a joy I think of being a long time gardener and a first time gardener, just being outside it’s always nice.

>> Ed Williams: Yeah, and not having to weed is the joy [LAUGH].

[00:29:51]

>> Savannah: Yeah.

>> Ed Williams: I think people going into it need to understand that the things they think will be problems very often are [LAUGH] Don’t think your weeds are gonna go away. You’re gonna have to dig them out, and we have some friends who work on a garden, I think it’s at Sedgefield Middle School or elementary school, I’m not sure what it is now.

[00:30:14]

But it has Bermuda Grass and what you know if you have a garden that has Bermuda Grass is that it’s always going to have Bermuda Grass. Just take that as part of life. So I would’ve shunned that idea at the outset because I didn’t, I’ve had my experiences with Bermuda grass and was content not to have it again.

[00:30:36]

But if you do the right steps, you have easy access to water. You have access to a few volunteers who will attend the thing, it’s not a big chore. And if it’s not a big chore, it’s a lot more fun.

>> Savannah: [COUGH] Yeah, for your volunteer base, is it all members of the church or is it outside members?

[00:30:56]

>> Ed Williams: No it’s all-

>> Savannah: Just all members of the church? Well, that’s good, I mean it’s kind of a built in volunteer base which is nice.

>> Ed Williams: Well we tell them they’re going to hell if they don’t, so that gives you some sort of leverage, I think.

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

[00:31:09]

>> Ed Williams: That we haven’t had to follow through on that. And we’ve got a couple of Sunday school classes and we have an email message group of people who have signed up, so it’s not really normally that big a challenge.

>> Savannah: Which kind of leads to my next question.

[00:31:27]

What have been, do you think, the biggest challenges of the community garden?

>> Ed Williams: Organizing, organizing the volunteers. That’s about it.

>> Savannah: I think we touched on this earlier, but it doesn’t have to be your community garden, but what challenges do you think Charlotte’s community gardens face?

>> Ed Williams: If there into distribution, that’s a big challenge.

[00:31:55]

We, as in everything else, decided to keep it as simple as we could, and go to Friendship Trays. In some places it may be that you simply don’t have a suitable place for it, and you try to transform what you know is an unsuitable place. So you have some challenges weeds, and soil fertility, and things like that.

[00:32:16]

But as in almost every endeavor, the big challenge is always the people. If you have people who are willing to make sensible decisions about use of resources, you can do most stuff. If you don’t, if you’re trying to overcome some significant natural barriers or you have people who want to run things to the exclusion of others, then you run into trouble.

[00:32:43]

As we were talking earlier, sustainability of the human effort and commitment as well as the, it’s the soil and plants is the big challenge.

>> Savannah: What have been some of the benefits and it doesn’t just have to be the Myers Parker but it could just be the benefits of community gardening.

[00:33:03]

>> Ed Williams: Well I think there’s a little community building involved. As I’ve said, we’ve had some work days and things like that, where a lot of kids get involved. The Charlotte kids’ yoga program always comes out-

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: Which has a presence at our church, comes out and works a day in the garden.

[00:33:23]

There are lot of things kids can do, it is not a highly demanding task to plant a bean. You push it in the ground and you cover it up and you’re okay. So kids can do that, and one year we let each kid write his or her name on a little stick and put it by the bean that that kid had planted and their parents particularly love that stuff, and it’s just fun seeing where stuff comes from.

[00:33:51]

I mean if you think everything you eat comes in on a truck to Harris Teeter you’re missing a significant part of what the world is really like. And I think seeing that process of creating the food that we eat is particularly useful as a teaching tool for kids.

[00:34:12]

But also as a reminder for adults that we’re not as far away from nature as we think we are. And I think it makes it a little easier to talk about the need to care for the Earth. If you’re actually working in it and getting things out of it.

[00:34:33]

>> Ed Williams: And it’s introduced me to some people I wouldn’t have known otherwise. And there is a kind of enthusiasm about it not just from the people who work in the garden but from people who are just proud that we’re doing it.

>> Savannah: Yeah, I mean I think that’s the emphasis on community-

[00:34:51]

>> Ed Williams: Yeah.

>> Savannah: And community gardens. And especially in a city of Charlotte that’s growing so fast.

>> Ed Williams: Yeah.

>> Savannah: And in an area where there is abundant food stores, and then there’s areas where there’s no grocery stores.

>> Ed Williams: Yeah, yeah.

>> Savannah: So the knowledge of learning about these vegetables and learning that we can grow things in this area is really important, which is why I’ve really liked community gardens and talking about them.

[00:35:15]

>> Ed Williams: Well, it’s fun to take some kids through the garden and just see what they can identify, cuz a lot of them have never seen things growing in nature. And to see a little tomato that becomes a big one, or a little bean that becomes a big one, or all of this mass of vines that is masking a sweet potato growing under the soil.

[00:35:40]

And if they’re there through the cycle, they can see the beginning of that process, and the end when you dig things up, or cut them up or what ever. Nothing cuts a good thing. It’s particularly good for churches. I think there’s a significant part of the reason for being for any church is to feed the hungry.

[00:36:04]

And this is part of that commitment but it also ought to be caring for the Earth the Lord gave us and seeing how much of it just works on its own, pays no attention to you whatsoever as long as you water it. [LAUGH]

>> Savannah: I will say, plants are very hardy.

[00:36:26]

I had my tomatoes and my peppers on just to porch. I might forget about them for a few days and then but water, just a little bit of water and a little bit of sun and they did just fine.

>> Ed Williams: Could you hear them screaming? [LAUGH]

>> Savannah: Yeah.

[00:36:39]

I forgot to tell my roommate to water for about a week and then I came home and I was like, my peppers. And I mean they came right back.

>> Ed Williams: It is a sad thing to see a healthy tomato that has collapsed because you failed to water it, and sometimes it’s going back.

[00:36:54]

Sometimes you water them and they just perk up, and sometimes they.

>> Savannah: I had two tomatoes that did really well, and one that I couldn’t bring it back. But I think that’s just the cycle of gardening.

>> Ed Williams: Yeah, yeah. Well we planted a bunch of beans one year, and these were maybe four year olds, five year olds from the church through the week school.

[00:37:16]

And one boy’s little bean just didn’t come up. And he was crushed. I said look, the germination rate on these seeds is about 99%, which means that you know starting out that one of them is not going to come up. You moved on that one, but here’s what you do.

[00:37:34]

Here’s another one, stick it in there.

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: We did, and it turned out all right, yeah.

>> Savannah: [COUGH], What do you see for the future of community gardens, here in Charlotte?

>> Ed Williams: Well, obviously, the number of them is growing rapidly, and Tom Duncan, who I suggested that you talk with, is kinda the overlord of community gardens, and they got a big grant from the Women’s Impact Fund, which gives money to good things.

[00:38:05]

So Friendship Trays offers both an easy distribution network, and expertise if you’re just getting started. My experience has been that gardeners from one garden are perfectly willing to help gardeners from another garden. We’ve got a number of people that have come by and wanted to know how we did this.

[00:38:26]

Business has been very supportive of our’s and I had to nudge some of them a little bit by writing to the corporate headquarters, but they’ve been good about giving us discounts on this, that, and the other. So there’s a lot of support for it. I think dealing with food deserts in Charlotte is gonna take a better organized and better financed effort than we have seen.

[00:38:53]

So far, but it is a way to do some things and I think once people begin to realize what they can do on their own, every little bit helps. So, I think there’s more and more concern about sustainability of almost everything. As we become more and more reliant on our cell phones and the people who live in Silicone Vally to make everything happen.

[00:39:22]

And we’re beginning to realize that we’re giving up not just a lot of freedom but also a lot of self reliance, and I think reminding people that there are a lot of things you can do yourself is liberating. And I think community gardens contribute to that and are evidence of the strong hunger for it, you are not gonna hear it.

[00:39:51]

>> Savannah: [COUGH] something you mentioned, is there, maybe there’s not but is there kind of a community of community gardeners when you said other gardeners came over and asked questions-

>> Ed Williams: Friendship Trays provides that with news writers and gathering of various sorts and all. So, there’s never been a question I’ve wanted them to answer that they haven’t helped me with.

[00:40:19]

And they have a couple events a year inviting. Community gardeners to come in. And then they have a garden specialist who will come out and-

>> Savannah: Really?

>> Ed Williams: Yeah, and help you do things.

>> Savannah: Very nice. Yeah, I didn’t know that.

>> Ed Williams: Yeah, ask Lucy about that.

>> Savannah: I will.

[00:40:35]

She showed us her wonderful map of the garden. I mean it’s fantastic and just how far they reach and she really touched on that. It’s not a food growing problem, but a distribution problem.

>> Ed Williams: Yeah.

>> Savannah: And that’s really kind of what people get mixed up sometimes.

>> Ed Williams: Yeah.

[00:40:50]

>> Savannah: So these are just two clarifying questions that I was thinking of, but so you don’t use any kind of pesticide or anything on your garden?

>> Ed Williams: No.

>> Savannah: Okay, when we went back to the question, I was just thinking about the insects, and so I wanted to make that clear.

[00:41:09]

And is there anything else that you wanna tell me about the garden, a funny story, or any other anecdote?

>> Ed Williams: Well, people do interesting things if it’s just that kind of out there and nobody’s guarding it. When we were just getting started, someone brought us these wonderful little bent wire words that we put on the drawing bench.

[00:41:34]

Grow love, stuff like that. And one of them was opus dei which is God’s work but is also the name of a Roman Catholic conservative organization that many people consider a cult. Mel Gibson is a member of it and we were having our opening of the garden. And I thought I wouldn’t put that up, I didn’t want to look like one of the dads that’s sponsored by a Roman Catholic cult of questionable political leanings.

[00:42:06]

So we left that off, but then we put it back on. I have a friend named Annie Hart who makes wonderful outdoor welded metal sculptures, and she made a sign for us and gave it to us. I mean people are so enamored of the idea that they enjoy being a part of it and they’ll contribute their skills even if their skills aren’t gardening to help make it look better and work better, produce more.

[00:42:38]

So it’s been an altogether rewarding experience. I’ve had to cut back quite a lot because of ill health, but people have stepped up. And it’s been nice to see, and I suspect we’ll have a new generation of gardeners. Nobody likes to see it not work [LAUGH]. So it’s been a good experience for the church, and it’s also good to have something that everybody knows is a good idea become reality.

[00:43:14]

Cuz you get kind of embarrassed if they’re good ideas that just kinda hang around [LAUGH] like deflated balloons on the table, you know?

>> Savannah: [LAUGH]

>> Ed Williams: Somebody needs to blow them up. [LAUGH] Let them shine.

>> Savannah: Well that’s all my questions, thank you so much for this, this was wonderful.

[00:43:29]

>> Ed Williams: It’s been my pleasure, thank you.

>> Savannah: This was really great, thank you.

>> Ed Williams: Just send my check to the usual place.

>> Savannah: I will. [LAUGH]