As you may have noticed we changed the name of our blog, and for those of you on the periphery of our lives, you may not understand the new title. Well the word clay holds multiple meanings for our garden and home in Rochester. When I was planning the garden last fall I began as most thorough gardeners ought to, by taking a soil sample for testing. The parcel of backyard space that had been dedicated to my grandmother’s kitchen garden years ago, to which according to her, “a truckload of manure had been added,” contained fairly rich soil that was quite pliable beneath the thick blanket of sod. Just steps beyond her productive corner however, was a hardpan, into which a strong shovel would barely sink under the weight of my beastly body ;). I struggled to dig out a suitable sample, and after sending the dull gray, clumpy matter to a lab, began looking into the soil maps of Monroe County, in hopes of obtaining more information about the composition of dirt in our backyard.
Well if any of you have read (or tried to read rather) a soil map, it is excruciating and painstaking work. Innumerable letters and symbols supposedly correspond with soil types, slope, and water table levels, yet in order to figure out what each symbol means, you must flip back and forth between indexes and maps, and after locating the proper explanation for found symbol, you must also know what sandy loam or loamy clay implies for growing a garden. And furthermore, much of the soil maps depicting urban areas are not even detailed with soil type and composition, but are designated simply as urban parcel. So after much ado for nothing, I turned to more plebian tactics. I consulted the nature of our place in the city, that of Clay Avenue. Well wouldn’t ya know, I didn’t need those fancy soil maps afterall, I just needed to think back to 1880 or so, when this here city street was being laid, and all those ancestors of future Kodak Park employees were struggling to lay their own kitchen gardens. “Damn it, I broke another spade! Why did we move here from Brockport anyway?”
So from urban designers and neighbors past, I concluded that the soil in our backyard is and has forever been primarily composed of clay. And it doesn’t take expertly researched maps to determine what a neighborhood walk can supplant. Just stroll a few blocks, past the Maplewood Rose Garden and down to the Genesee, and anyone can see that the earth beneath and alongside the river that bisects our city, and thus puts us on the mistreated Westside, is grayish brown clay that turns the river into murky chocolate milk, and our backyard soil into bedrock.
Despite the bleak forecast, we have managed to work well with what we were given. Like the endless possibilities a potter faces when setting clay to wheel and beginning to spin, we have shaped the garden through our own vision and by the work of our crafty hands, into something that reflects our appetites for food and earthly knowledge. We envision our backyard as a testing ground for the lofty ambitions we hold on to of one day growing food for others and developing our trade from the offerings of land and kitchen. Until then, we continue to work with Clay and are delighted by all that Clay provides.
The beginning of the garden and blooming elderberry bush, mid June 2011
First growth garden, mid June 2011
Same vantage, two months later
Pachamama Farm 