Photograpy by Greg Rannells
There are actually, surprisingly, fences that separate the back yards of the three storybook cottages that form a row on this tree-lined street in Glendale—but they’re wood fences, not even waist-high, practically meaningless. Whoever said, “Good fences make good neighbors” might have done well to do what these three neighbors did and decide to grow a vegetable garden together instead.
It came about, as these things often do, over dinner. One evening about eight years ago (no one remembers when exactly), Carol and Dan Gravens had joined their neighbors David Stradal, Maurice Weilbacher, and his wife, Lisa, at the Weilbacher home, and Carol mentioned how nice it would be to plant a vegetable garden. The problem wasn’t know-how; it was space. The Gravens are both master gardeners and avid volunteers at the Missouri Botanical Garden. But their back yard was already chock-full, with a lovingly tended riot of hostas, ferns, lilies, and roses, as well as a good portion of Carol’s potted orchid collection (numbering more than 200 plants), many of which she brings outside come spring. Maurice and Lisa’s yard, in turn, was dominated by a custom-made, copper-roofed henhouse.
“And then David said, ‘What about the space behind my garage?’” Carol remembers.
It wasn’t promising. It was, she says, a “forgotten area.” Choked with bush honeysuckle and invasive plants, there was no telling what lay beneath—rocks, as it turned out, and chunks of old concrete. “We hauled away eight truckloads,” Lisa says. But in the end, the project—the sort that might have overwhelmed a single homeowner, the kind of daunting task put off from one weekend to another, until good intentions fade along a trail of indefinite postponements—actually got done. Then the fun began.
Maurice (who happens to be president of Avalon Construction) set about building six rectangular raised beds, each about 20 feet square, using plastic two-by-sixes from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Pots to Planks program, which recycles plastic garden pots and trays. The group filled the beds with a mix of soil, compost, peat moss, and calcite clay (“It helps hold the moisture,” says Dan, who, appropriately, is still wearing his docent shirt from the botanical garden).
The average backyard vegetable garden typically evinces a haphazard air, a function both of the oft–jerry-built contraptions meant to set bean or tomato vines climbing, coupled with the hodgepodge assortment of plants themselves, chosen not for their spectacular floral displays or their beautifully broad, variegated leaves, but for the produce they might yield. But that’s not the case here. Bordered by pompom bursts of hydrangeas at the back and a pair of sentinel arborvitaes in the front, the path among the beds is blanketed with fresh wood chips every season, and the whole garden is presided over (ironically) by a 3-foot-tall topiary bunny of Lisa’s design. Even the beds themselves, bounded by that black plastic lumber, look elegant. If Philippe Starck were to design eco-friendly garden beds, this is what they’d probably look like.
But as with all gardens, this one lives by the rhythm of the seasons. Every autumn, the group plants winter wheat, which makes for a pretty display and, come spring, is tilled under to feed the soil. In March, the cold-weather crops go in: broccoli, Swiss chard, lettuce, arugula, and kohlrabi. (“We all love kohlrabi,” Carol says. “We just inhale kohlrabi!”) With this year’s wacky spring, the group got a head start on the warm-weather crops, putting in tomatoes the third week of April. Pole beans, beets, basil, peppers, eggplant, and parsley go in, too, along with summer squash—after a couple disappointing years of being decimated by squash vine borers, the plants seem to be doing well. “That one’s almost doubled in a day,” Dan says, pointing to a patch where the leaves are already the size of your average salad plate.
And after the planting? “We just water, water, and water,” says Lisa. There’s no set schedule, no calendar, no assigned tasks. Everyone just checks in and sees what needs to be done. For all of their collected expertise, each season, each crop, still has its surprises. “We tried corn one year,” Carol says. “Then we had a hailstorm, and all we had were stalks.” This year, the beets didn’t germinate for some reason, and an unusual explosion in the rabbit population has necessitated the installation of chicken wire (no gunmetal-gray wire here, though—camouflage green all the way).
So does all of this neighborly camaraderie extend to harvest time? After all, there are no designated beds—everyone just plants wherever. “We come and harvest what we want, whenever we want,” Carol says. “You can take anything, even if you didn’t plant it.” As for any wilted lettuce or other scraps, they go to the Weilbachers’ hens (Americaunas, Araucanas, and Cuckoo Marans), which in turn produce an abundance of eggs, their shells ranging in color from green with dark speckles to deep chocolate. “That reminds me,” Lisa says, turning to Carol. “You need to come over and get some eggs!”
