Marianne Rzepka

The sky was full of fast-moving clouds – disappearing remnants of a morning’s rain – and temperatures were falling from a week of 90-degree weather into the 70s.

A breeze was the final touch to the perfect weather at Kirk Jones’ Good Scents Gardens in Ypsilanti Township.

“Being out here,” said Jones. “I like this.”

Good thing, because the flowers he grows there are his business. Jones uses the yarrow, zinnias, butterfly weed and agastache for bouquets he puts together and personally delivers to regular subscribers.

Jones explains it as a twist on the idea of community supported agriculture, or CSA, in which subscribers pay a set amount for one season of produce from a local farm. Instead of picking up a carton of vegetables once a week, Good Scents’ customers get a floral bouquet delivered to their home or business once a week.

Like a CSA, in which a subscriber’s take depends on what and how much the farmer raises over a season, Good Scents’ customers get what Jones chooses to plant and what comes up each year. No matter what, he said, they will get a bouquet of flowers each week over the 26-week season.

“If I have to buy commercial flowers, I’ll do it,” he said. “You’ll get your flowers.”

Jones, 52, was working on computer software in 2003 when he started Good Scents, selling bouquets through Downtown Home and Garden in Ann Arbor. (He has a B.A. in biology and another in computer science.)

He soon added deliveries to his Good Scents business, but worked both jobs for five years, dropping out of the computer world in 2008 to work and manage the bouquet business full time.

Now Jones has about 70 customers. About 40 of them get their bouquets delivered to their homes, and the rest at their workplaces.

Kirk Jones of Good Scents Gardens arranges bouquets of flowers in his garage, before delivering them to customers at their homes or offices. (Photos by the writer.)

Jones will pick the flowers a day or two before the bouquets are delivered, going out with buckets and wide-mouthed jars to gather whatever is ready. “If there’s anything blooming, I cut it,” he said.

At home – about four miles and two stop signs from the garden – Jones arranges the flowers in his garage, assembling the bouquets among the tools, the lawn mower and a bright yellow kayak hanging from the rafters.

Each of the bouquets is different, depending on which flowers are available. However, he thinks about what each customer has gotten in the past when he decides which bouquet goes to which customer.

So don’t expect the same thing every week, and don’t expect any of the dozens of bouquets he puts together every week to be identical.

Then, in the early hours of each Monday morning, he begins delivery to homes, then goes out again during business hours bringing bouquets to offices. For customers who prefer bouquets for the weekend, Jones also makes deliveries on Friday. Each week he also retrieves the empty glass jars that contained the previous week’s bouquet, which customers set out for him much like people used to leave their empty milk bottles for the milkman.

“He must do it in the middle of the night,” said Nancy Slezak, one of Jones’ customers who always finds a bouquet in the breezeway of her Ypsilanti home on Fridays from May to mid-October. And, she said, Jones has never missed a week.

Slezak started getting the flowers as a prize in a raffle several years ago. Now, it’s an extravagance she allows herself even though she just recently retired from her teaching job in the Ann Arbor schools.

But the bouquets are beautiful, she said. Sometimes they are pink, purple and cream. Sometimes they come in bright yellows and oranges.

She especially likes the yellow sunflowers and the orange lilies, and she likes how the bouquets are arranged. “He puts thought into it,” Slezak said. “He doesn’t just stick things in a jar.”

Sometimes she breaks up the big bouquets up into smaller sprays to spread around the house or give them away. Sometimes a bouquet will become a birthday gift to give a friend.

Slezak knows the flowers are an extravagance, but “as long as I can afford it, I will get it,” she said.

Jones charges $14 per bouquet, a total of $364 if you get a whole seasons’ worth of blooms – though Jones said he’ll consider something shorter.

Kirk Jones at the large plot he rents from Dawn Farm, where he grows flowers for his business, Good Scents Gardens.

Jones was always growing flowers. He had a plot with the community gardening group Project Grow, and over time the flowers pushed out the vegetables.

He’s still on the Project Grow board, but finds he doesn’t really have time to tend another garden.

Though his interest in flowers turned into his job, Jones said it’s still fun to grow and arrange the bouquets. He doesn’t even mind the early morning deliveries, though he admits that the least likable part of his business is dealing with traffic when he delivers during the day.

During his delivery season, Jones spends more of his time tending the business than the flowers.

He figures he spends about 15 hours a week out at the land he rents from Dawn Farm on Stony Creek Road. His plot is out behind the parking lot, within sight of the donkeys and llamas, just next to the turkeys waiting for Thanksgiving. If the wind is right, you’ll get the full smelly effect of life on a farm.

On the day I stopped by, the gusty wind was easily outmaneuvered, and it was a treat to watch the bees, the butterflies and even the giant orb spider while morning clouds cleared out of a blue, blue sky. A wall of goldenrod barricaded the rows of beds on the far side.

Jones has about 100 beds in the garden, each about 100 square feet with either flowers in bloom, flowers waiting to bloom or flowers finished blooming.

The daffodils, of course, have already disappeared for the year, and the short lilac bushes are nothing but puckered leaves. But there are beds busy with colorful zinnia and dahlias, along with pale pink lisianthus, a light green nicotiana and Frosty Morn sedum.

Jones also grows greenery for his bouquets, including boxwood and red cedar, but not firs, which make every bouquet look like Christmas, he said.

The mix means the color and life of the garden changes as the summer moves on. This can make for a less-than-neat plot, but Jones doesn’t care. It’s the difference between gardening for a business and gardening for yourself.

“I have to remember this is not my yard, and it’s not my garden,” he said. “It’s never going to be perfect.”

For information about Good Scents Gardens, including a gallery of bouquets, is on the firm’s website.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Flowers soon to be transformed into bouquets for Good Scents Gardens' customers.

Marianne Rzepka

There’s a lot to learn from growing a garden, and a lot of Ann Arbor’s schools are finding that out.

Gone are the days when plant studies meant each student sprouted a lone bean seed in a Styrofoam cup. Now students as young as 5 are planting vegetable gardens and watching them grow.

“It’s, like, cool to see things grow,” says Yonatan Hodish, 13, a seventh grader at Ann Arbor Open @ Mack.

I visited garden projects at three Ann Arbor schools – Ann Arbor Open, Bryant Elementary and Burns Park Elementary – to see how tending a garden is helping kids learn. Though much of the growing season is ahead of us, students were able to harvest some early crops before leaving on Friday for summer vacation. Volunteers will tend the gardens over the summer, but kids will return in the fall to see how the foundation they laid this spring has paid off in edibles.

The garden at Ann Arbor Open is in a former sand lot located between Miller Road and a tennis court, along the now-closed driveway and not far from the school’s butterfly garden and a native plants area.

The sand provided a good base for the garden, says teacher Aina Bernier, but it needed a lot of compost and manure before students could start planting there.

Seventh- and eighth-grade students work in the garden as an elective, and in addition to planting, weeding and harvesting, they do experiments, such as planting old seeds to see how they’ll grow, or treating plants differently – less or more water, less or more sun – to see how they’ll do.

Griffin Roy, 13, likes gardening at school. “Having a garden at home is kinda like fun,” he says, “but with friends at school it’s much better, in my opinion, because you can socialize.”

Amani Imran, left, and Rina Ishida, both 7, stayed behind to finish up weeding their class's garden plot at Bryant Elementary School. (Photos by the writer.)

At Bryant Elementary School, students literally had a long row to hoe this semester.

First a strip of ground was plowed up in a large field up a small hill near the school. Then students set to work picking the rocks out of the bed and laying out 17 plots, each about 2 yards square, one for each class.

But the gardens still weren’t ready for planting, because “Mrs. K wasn’t happy with the soil,” says Bryant second-grade teacher Jeanne Kitzmann, making fun of her own insistence. Students had to put in topsoil and composted manure to get the soil in shape before seeds and seedlings could go in the ground.

Kitzmann, who grew up on an Iowa farm, had her second grade sow radishes, lettuce, watermelon and sunflowers. They had a radish harvest several weeks ago and a salad party before the end of the academic year Friday. Not bad for students of 7 or 8 years.

“One of the best things about working in the garden is that it fit into every grade level,” says Kitzmann. Kindergartners were learning about soil, first graders about plants and weather, second graders about plants.

And when Kitzmann’s class was picking rocks out of the soil, they were studying geology in the classroom. When they were measuring out the plots, they were using the metric measurements they were learning in school.

Second-grader Anthony Walker, 7, fills buckets with wood chips to spread on the walkways at the Burns Park Elementary garden.

Students at Burns Park Elementary School started their own garden this year, too. By the end of the school year, kindergarteners were tending sunflowers and morning glories, hoping the two rows will intertwine into a green arch by the time classes start again in the fall. When this year’s first graders return as second graders, they should be able to see how the three types of beans they planted have climbed their three stick-and-twine teepees that were set up this spring.

In the past few weeks, the third graders planted popcorn, which was just starting to poke out of the ground when the academic year ended. Fourth graders have two large beds with pumpkins and honeydew melons.

And since they won’t be back in September – they’re moving on to middle school – the fifth graders worked on the lettuce and radishes, which were harvested before the end of the school year.

Every Thursday, students could spend their recess working in the garden. Students worked on their own class projects or helped with other beds, including tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, flowers and a row of raspberries.

Parent Lynda Norton estimates that up to 150 students regularly showed up on Thursdays, spending time recording the temperature, looking for bugs and pulling weeds, instead of playing on the nearby playground equipment.

Like many gardens, the 5,000-square-foot garden is much bigger than what was originally planned, says Norton. The idea was to start small, maybe a third of what is there now. “We had a plan,” she says, “then it morphed.”

Students laid out the beds, hauled wood chips and compost and made signs for the rows of vegetables. But parents have gotten just as involved.

They did the heavy lifting – amending the hard clay with compost, building raised beds and some of the structures, such as the strawberry bed. Parents volunteered their time helping the students in the garden, and there have been a number of donations from families, including some stepping stones dropped off near the fence recently.

And now that summer is here, there is a waiting list of families who are volunteering to do watering, weeding and harvesting at the garden.

Though the garden isn’t even a year old, it looks established, with a fence built with the help of a grant from the Ann Arbor Public Schools Educational Foundation, and a neat shed, purchased with a grant from Lowe’s, that shelters gardening tools and garden diaries of some of the students.

Last week, a number of students in the garden during recess headed for the watering cans or spray bottles. Those with spray bottles spent some time watering fellow students instead of the plants. But others made sure their flowers and vegetables got some hydrating.

Thirteen-year-old Alex Schmidt, a seventh grader, shows off the lettuce he picked in the garden at Ann Arbor Open @ Mack on Thursday.

At Ann Arbor Open, watering is just as popular an activity in the garden – last week, that meant making some mud to squish around in – but students really liked seeing how much everything grew over the final weeks of school, especially when they returned after a week away and found both their vegetables and the weeds green and lush.

Not everything grew so well. Early in the spring, 13-year-old Madeline Qi and her friends planted radish seeds packaged about 15 years ago. As might be expected, they didn’t grow very well. Even the radishes that grew from the newer seeds had some problems. “Our poor radishes,” Qi says. “We kept pulling them up to look at them.”

But she has hopes for the pumpkin vine, so she’ll be back over the summer to check out its progress. “I have never grown a pumpkin before,” she says, “so I want to see how it does.”

Bernier says students are encouraged to come out and see how the garden is doing this summer, and she’ll email everyone if something is ready to be harvested.

Eighth grader Marley Beaver, 14, was out on the last day of school helping with the lettuce harvest. She’ll be going to Skyline High School next year and the worst thing, she says, is that “they don’t have a garden there.”

On the last day in the garden last week, the sun was shining and there was a breeze when the students came out to harvest lettuce for end-of-the-school year salads.

You know the answer to this question already, but it was posed to 12-year-old Fiona Powell: In the last days before school is out for the summer, would you rather be sitting inside or out in the garden?

“Definitely,” she says, “out here.”

Seventh-graders Ben Van Dijk, left, and Sam Lewis, both 13, harvested lettuce in the garden at Ann Arbor Open @ Mack at the end of the school year.

From left to right: Taylor Hanback, 7; Shyanne Wilson, 7; Daniel Dotson, 8, second-grade teacher Cheryl Ervin; Aboulaye Sylla, 8; Michael Davis, 7; Omar Mohammad, 7; and Ezra Conway, 7, take a close look at the lettuce in their garden plot at Bryant Elementary School.

Third-grader Quentavia Keene, 9, waters the flowers in the Burns Park Elementary garden.

Third-graders Claire Bott, left, and Callie Hastie, both 9, pick peas in the Burns Park Elementary garden.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

Tomm Becker hasn’t been afraid of a spring frost killing the lettuce, tomatoes, cilantro, kale and chard he’s growing at Sunseed Farm.

That’s because he’s growing them under the plastic cover of a 30-by-96-foot hoop house, which since last fall has been a source of vegetables through most of the winter.

Hoop houses let the sun in, and the solar-powered heat warms up the soil and keeps tender plants from freezing in early and late frosts. When a strong wind flapped the hoop house cover at Sunseed Farm last week, it blew through the openings where the plastic had been hoisted to provide ventilation. The day before had brought cold temperatures and heavy rains that flooded the nearby rye field, so the side flaps had been down to keep the heat in.

“The great thing (about hoop houses) is you can control everything,” Becker says.

Hoop houses aren’t just for farms – a backyard hoop house can give anyone a head start on the season. Then even into the winter, you can grow some cold weather crops – like lettuce – or store root crops, like carrots.

But like anything else in your garden – ponds, chickens, a compost pile – a hoop house is a project that never stops.

Small Farms, Year-Round Local Produce

The Sunseed Farm hoop house is working so well for Tomm and Trilby Becker that they’ll be getting another one in about a week at their farm off Joy Road, just northwest of Ann Arbor. In time, they want to have about five hoop houses to grow a variety of vegetables throughout most of the year for members of their CSA (community-supported agriculture) program.

The Beckers’ hoop house, along with several others in the area, were built with microloans from Repasts, Present and Future, an organization run by Lisa Gottlieb and Jeff McCabe to support local farmers. [Much of their funding comes from donations raised during their weekly breakfast salon – Friday Mornings @ SELMA – held at their home on Ann Arbor's west side and featuring local chefs and locally produced food.]

With hoop houses, says Gottlieb, a local farm can produce food for most of the year. “For our climate, hoop houses are really something terrific,” she says.

Hoop houses allow you to control, to some degree, the microclimate within the structure. When the sun is shining and the temperature is going up, you can open the vents to cool down the heat that can easily climb to more than 100 degrees, even in the winter. And when the heat increases, the humidity also builds up. After a while, the plants just can’t breathe, Tomm Becker says.

Of course, there are things that are beyond anyone’s control. During the winter, clouds and cold – along with the shorter daylight hours – will keep pretty much anything from growing. “In late December and January,” says Becker, “everything is pretty much in stasis.”

The trick is to plan ahead, planting crops late in the past season that can be picked in the dead of winter, he says.

It’s also tough to control what gets into that hoop house, which can be a warm and comfortable place for greens-eating critters – like mice and voles – during the winter. And some insects, like aphids, will find a warm, moist hoop house their idea of heaven. Moisture also is a wonderful medium for growing fungi, which is not good unless you’re raising mushrooms.

Backyard Hoop Houses

If you’re interested in simply feeding yourself and your family, you might be able to get by with a 1,500-square-foot hoop house, says John Hochstetler, who has four hoop houses that provide about 6,000 square feet of space for growing vegetables and flowers for the market. It can even be pretty cheap, he says, if you save your own seeds.

The first thing to do is figure out what you want in a hoop house. “If you don’t know what you’re doing,” says Hochstetler, “it’s going to be a big mess.”

Get some good materials, including heavy duty plastic and a framework that will stand up. Hochstetler’s first hoop house was built with plans he found online, and PVC piping from a big box store. The first heavy snowfall smashed his work flatter than a bug. Lesson learned, Hochstetler now builds his hoop houses with steel frames.

If you’d like to start with something a little smaller, Ann Arbor architect Dave Sebolt has designed a hoop house measuring roughly 12-by-12 feet that costs about $200 to build. And it’s got a shape that will keep the snow load from building up.

“The one I put together has a little roundedness on the top,” Sebolt says. “It gets into a 40-degree slope, more a parabolic arch. If the angle is 45 degrees or steeper, the snow will slide off.” (Click here to download a copy of his plans.)

He also found that snow piled around the base of the structure might cause the ribs to collapse at the ground level. His solution is to simply clear that snow away. It might also help to mulch along the base or use foam to keep out the critters.

Sebolt also suggests that hoop house builders stretch the side plastic down into the ground, to better anchor the structure against any winds that might tip it over or fly it off to Oz.

There are advantages to larger hoop houses. Smaller structures can overheat quickly. Larger ones also can overheat, but it will take longer. By the same token, larger structures will take longer to cool, which keeps frost off from the plants more effectively.

No matter what the size or the season, you’ll have to keep an eye on the temperature. Sebolt recommends using heat pistons that expand with the heat to open ventilation windows and contract when the temperature cools, so that the windows close.

The heat/cold, moisture and sun principles are the same whether you’ve got a commercial-size hoop house, a portable cold frame that fits over a single bed or something as simple as a glass bell jar or the bottom of a plastic milk carton.

I don’t have anything like a hoop house in my yard, because the space is just too small. But I might be able to use something like a cold frame, which is just a wooden box with a cover that lets in light and keeps frost away from transplants.

They can be small, portable and much cheaper than a full-fledged hoop house. You could put a 5-by-10-foot cold frame together for as little as $25 if you use recycled materials – using an old shower door for the top of the cold frame, for example. Ann Arbor’s ReUse Center or Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore are great places to look for what you need.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

Friends don’t ask me how I feel about February. They’ve already heard me say that there’s a reason why the worst month in the year – cold, icy, gray – is the shortest month. And when it’s over, it’s still winter.

So when the first of March rolled around this year – coming in like a lamb, instead of a lion – I was left blinking in the sun and looking like I just crawled out of hibernation. There was sun and steadily rising temperatures, so sue me if I think spring is already here.

But though the temperatures are already in the 50s, these weeks can be the winter of a gardener’s discontent.

We want to get out there, we want to start digging, but we know it’s just too darn early. It’s even too early to set up the grow lights to start my tomato plants from seed. Some stoics will tell you it’s even too early to walk on your lawn!

I know there are things I could be doing to get ready for the growing season. I could be planning my vegetable garden, getting serious about the seed catalogs that are piled up around my reading chair, or sharpening my garden spade.

But these are things I could have done anytime over the past winter months – and I didn’t. Spring fever may get me going on these tasks, but this is the time of year when an array of classes, talks and projects are more apt to get my attention.

If you’d like to ease into the growing season, you can start simply by calling up Dial-A-Garden at 734-971-1129. There are a number of recordings that change monthly, and you can see a list of the topics at online. This month, there are recordings on crabgrass control, testing leftover seeds, starting vegetable seeds and spraying fruit trees.

You also can learn about forcing spring-blooming branches. Some branches – like forsythia and quince – will bloom more easily than others, says Madolyn Kaminski, who oversees the Dial-A-Garden programs. You simply cut some long whips from those bushes and put them in vases in your house. Every day, change the water and snip a little bit off the bottom. In about two weeks, you’ll get some early spring blooms. The closer it is to the time the bush would naturally bloom, the faster you’ll get blooms on your cuttings.

If that’s too much fun for you, it’s also time to spray your rose bushes with sulfur lime, says Kaminski. She swears that you’ll be surprised at how it will reduce the amount of black spot.

Kaminski also is in charge of the Herb Study Group that meets once a month at the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens, 1800 N. Dixboro Road. Members next meet on April 7 to discuss starting herbs from seed. The meeting will start at 7 p.m. in Room 125. If you’re interested, just show up.

“Four to six weeks before they go in the ground is the best time to start your herbs,” says Kaminski, who is successfully raising a 6-foot-tall bay leaf tree at home.

If you’d like to get out of the house, this time of year is good for pruning – just ask the crews in my neighborhood hacking at the trees crossing the power lines. You can prune your own shrubs and trees, and now that there are no leaves to get in the way, you’ll have a clear view to clip out any crossing branches or trim lopsided edges.

Normally, I would recommend stopping by any of the volunteer work days usually held on the second Saturday of the month at UM’s Nichols Arboretum and the third Saturday of the month at Matthaei.

But not this month. This month, there’s too much mud, so volunteer days for both places have been canceled for March, says volunteer coordinator Tara Griffith. If you still have time in April, you can make sure the volunteer days are a go by calling her at 734-647-8528. It’s just for the morning, and you can learn a lot by lopping out invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle with professionals.

Book cover for "Easy Edibles" by Sheri Repucci.

If that’s too much action for you, settle down with a copy of “Easy Edibles: A Beginner’s Guide to Growing Organic Food in the Lower Great Lakes Region” by Sheri Repucci, who used to be in charge of garden activities and coordination at Project Grow.

The book is aimed at beginners because they are often “overwhelmed” by details when they talk to seasoned gardeners, says Repucci. But the book’s also good for those seasoned gardeners who appreciate a compendium of common sense basics. Besides chapters on setting up a vegetable garden and choosing plants, there are profiles of a number of easily grown vegetables with typical height, sun and soil needs, planting depths and harvest times.

The book – issued by Ann Arbor publishing house Alice Greene & Co. – can be found at Border’s, Downtown Home and Garden, Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room and Hollander’s, as well as at Matthaei and Zingerman’s Roadhouse. Or check the publisher’s website.

I enjoyed the “Challenging Vegetables” section, which included some of the crops – corn, potatoes, eggplant – I grew last summer without much thought. That conforms to my planting philosophy of “just stick it in the ground and see what comes up.”

Repucci, who now lives in Toronto where she’s studying the effects of healing gardens at York University, has more reasoned advice, warning any gardening wanna-be not to mistakenly jumpstart the growing season. “The spring can fool you,” she told me in a recent phone call. “Even experts can be surprised at how fast the weather can turn.”

Too early and an unexpected freeze will turn those tomatoes into limp sticks. Even if the weather isn’t too cold, planting in soil that isn’t warm enough will set your tender plants back, Repucci says.

Just what I don’t need to hear – although it’s something that I know. So instead of going out and urging my daffodils and tulips to hurry up and bloom, I’ll take another piece of Repucci’s advice.

She says her research into the therapeutic qualities of gardens tells her that you don’t have to dig or prune or plant things in the ground to get the benefits.

“You just have to look at it,” Repucci says. “What makes a garden therapeutic is looking at it.”

Guess I’ll just pull a chair up to my kitchen window and watch the rest of the snow melt while I plan a new raised bed.

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Project Grow site at Greenview last Sunday. Near the end of the growing season, gardeners were starting to clear out cages and wire, preparing the plots for the fall tilling. (Photo by the writer.)

At the Project Grow annual meeting, held on Oct. 8 at the Leslie Science Center, the same contentious issue surfaced as at last year’s meeting: Should the organic gardening nonprofit add members to its board or not?

Last year the answer was yes: Kirk Jones and Royer Held were voted onto the board by the members present at the meeting. [Chronicle coverage: "Project Grow Board Expands"]

This year was no different. In addition to re-electing Damaris Suffalko as a continuing board member, members elected Andrew Comai, David Corsa and Alice Telesnitsky as additions.

The ease with which board members can be added by a member vote is a function of Project Grow’s incorporation as a 501(c)3 membership organization as contrasted with a 501(c)3 directorship organization.

And although the meeting’s written agenda indicated board president Devon Akmon as a candidate for re-election to the board, he withdrew his name in the course of the meeting, which an attendee aptly summarized at one point by saying, “It feels very tense in here.”

The departure of Akmon from the board prompted board member Catherine Riseng to caution the roughly 40 people in the room: “We’re going to miss his skills more than you can possibly realize.”  

The tension at the Project Grow annual meeting was driven both by philosophical differences on the board about appropriate strategies for expanding that body and as well as the logistics of how some green half-sheets of paper were distributed during the meeting. The green sheets listed out a the slate of candidates – Suffalko, Comai, Corsa, and Telesnitsky – and were passed around before the executive director of Project Grow, Melissa Kesterson, had finished her presentation on the organization’s accomplishments over the last year.

The move was characterized later during the discussion by one attendee as “slightly rude.” For her part, when the slate was distributed, Kesterson remarked: “I’m feeling a little distracted. I was feeling good about what we’d done and I thought other people did, too.”

Annual Status Report

Among the achievements for the past year that Kesterson ticked through at the meeting were the establishment of three new gardening sites: Northside Park, Wines Elementary, and Hunt Park. [Chronicle coverage of a meeting to plan the Hunt Park garden: "Project Grow Gardens at Hunt Park?"]

And six existing gardens had been expanded to create 20 additional plots. A plot measures roughly 25 x 30 feet. Eeking out an extra plot here and there, plus the new gardening sites, meant that more than 300 plots were gardened by a total of over 1,300 people, Kesterson reported. She explained that there are  groups who garden some of the plots, and some of the plots are gardened by multi-member households.

The demand for gardening space is high: There were 65 applicants for garden plots who could not be accommodated this year.

Kesterson also introduced a collaboration between Avalon Housing and Project Grow to bring gardening to Avalon residents in the form of raised bed gardens – built of over 24,000 pounds of stone block donated by Fendt Builder’s Supply. The venture is called Edible Avalon, and is funded  by the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation with a grant made jointly to Food Gatherers and other community-based organizations.

Kesterson also highlighted Go! Gardening, an experiential school gardening program that operates at area elementary schools. Project Grow staff help teachers coordinate activities, lessons and schedules so students get the most out of their time in the garden, with lessons drawing on Grade Level Content Expectations (GLCEs).

The 2008 financial picture showed $57,769 in income against $60,864 in revenue for a net loss for the year of $3,095.  The financial statement offered increases in water costs at the gardening sites, as well as rain during a fundraiser as reasons for the shortfall. Cash reserves were used to cover the loss.

The "Back to our Roots!" slate of Project Grow board candidates.

Division on the Board

As Kesterson’s presentation blended into the discussion of board elections when the half sheets of green paper were distributed, there was some confusion as to whether the “Back to our Roots!” slate was a ballot. It was not.

Early in the discussion, which Akmon led as board president, he indicated he was withdrawing his name from consideration for re-election. He would later during the meeting attribute that decision to the distribution of a slate of candidates – especially its premature distribution – characterizing it as indicative of an “activist board,” which he said he considered to be “toxic.”

Akmon described how the board had sought advice from three different consultants. Among them was Sabra Briere, who represents Ward 1 on city council, and who earlier this year argued the case unsuccessfully to her council colleagues that Project Grow should be allocated a $7,000 grant from the city in its FY 2010 budget.

The other two consultants, Akmon said, were Jim Frenza, who’s a past president of Ann Arbor’s Hands-On Museum, and Diana Kern, of the NEW Center (Nonprofit Enterprise at Work). What the board had heard from all three consultants, he said, was that Project Grow should be planful in expanding its board. The nonprofit should identify the skills of existing board members, and figure out what skills were missing, then recruit people with those skills – as opposed to allowing the board to grow by adding people who had a willingness to serve.

It was board members Devon Akmon, Joan Bulmer and Catherine Riseng who seemed to be more interested in a systematic and planned growth of the board, as contrasted with Held, Jones, and Suffalko, who wanted to open the board to those willing to serve.

In the end, it’s Project Grow members who must vote on the issue, and ultimately, the argument that seemed to carry the day was the fact that the Project Grow bylaws allow up to 15 board members. With the net increase of two members, they’d still have only eight board members – plenty of room to expand in whatever planful way the board might desire. The Chronicle recorded a show-of-hands tally of 33 yes, 1 no, and 6 abstentions to elect the green slate of candidates as a block.

How Does an Organization Organize Itself?

The discussion at the Project Grow annual meeting was couched in terms of whether the nonprofit should be member-driven or not – although Akmon sketched out the possibility of a member-driven organization that still grew its board systematically, facilitated through a nominating committee, for example.

In terms of nonprofit organizational structure, the power that the members of Project Grow have within the 501(c)3 classification derives from the way it was incorporated – as a membership organization. That contrasts with a younger gardening nonprofit, Ypsilanti-based Growing Hope, which was incorporated as a directorship. Growing Hope executive director Amanda Edmonds emailed The Chronicle with the clarification: “We’re directorship-incorporated. When we started we didn’t have anything that would really define a membership.”

Membership organizations, of course, need not be 501(c)3 nonprofits. Think cooperatives. At the last meeting of the Ann Arbor city council, a proclamation of October as “Co-op Month” was presented to Eric Lipson, who’s general manager of the Inter-Cooperative Council, based in Ann Arbor.

Between now and the next annual Project Grow meeting, one measure of how effective the organization has been will be how many of the 65 applicants who did not get gardening plots last year will be provided with a plot in the summer of 2010.

[Editor's note: The Chronicle gardens with Project Grow at the Greenview site. We specialize in potatoes. The potato harvest is donated to Food Gatherers, in part because the favorite vegetable of Food Gatherers executive director, Eileen Spring, is the potato.]

Marianne Rzepka

When Royer Held decides which tomatoes to plant in his garden each year, he doesn’t look through seed catalogs. He simply sorts through a collection of plastic bags that hold his own private stash of tomatoes-to-be.

He’s a seed-saver, cleaning and saving seeds from his own stock of plants and trading with others who have varieties he’d like to try. It’s his way of saving the flavorful tomatoes he loves and maybe even developing a new strain by working with generations of hybrids.

“Seed-saving is the ultimate source of local food,” says Held, a computer programmer who’s been involved in gardening since he was a child.

Held’s slightly disheveled garden at Greenview Park – one of the Project Grow gardens there – is a library of tomato genetics, but with wood-and-wire frames in the place of shelves, and instead of handing you a volume to read, he might give you a tomato to taste – maybe a Lollipop cherry tomato or a sausage-shaped Pirkstine Orange.

Held’s efforts go back to the time when farmers saved seeds from their gardens, developing regional varieties of tomatoes with resistance to local diseases. When seed companies began to sprout, representatives traveled around the country picking up promising tomato lines and developing new hybrids.

Royer Held, left, at a Sept. 12 HomeGrown Festival tomato tasting. (Photo by the writer.)

After years of saving and trading seeds, Held is growing genetically sturdy heirloom tomatoes – like Olga’s Yellow Round Chicken – in his 25-by-30-foot plot, as well as a number of hybrids that can result in any number of next-generation variations. A tomato that ripens as green one year, might produce seeds with recessive color genes that grow red or brown or yellow, white or pink fruit the next year. He’s even gotten all those colors from the same generation of tomatoes.

Held got started years ago when he and Marcella Trautmann started planting tomatoes in the Project Grow garden at Catholic Social Services at the corner of Packard Street and Golfside Drive. They must have put in about 200 tomatoes on their plot there, says Trautmann, who also is a walking encyclopedia of tomato information.

Currently, she has a vegetable garden at County Farm Park, along with a separate plot for her tomato crop, which this year includes 70 varieties.

Held is growing only 24 tomato varieties this year; last year, he had 46. One year, there were 100, he says, but he had to make some room for other vegetables, like potatoes – which developed into another seed-saving project.

Each season, Held tries to have a garden that includes tomatoes of every stripe, including cherry, beefsteak, oxheart and salad varieties, with all the shapes and colors that tomato leaves come in. This past season, with its wet weather and cool nights, hasn’t been the greatest for tomatoes. Held says the tomatoes that have done the best in his garden are from more northern climes, such as Manx Marvel, from the Isle of Man, which held up well.

Though the tomato is a New World vegetable, it’s become quite global. What would Italian cuisine be without the tomato?

But different cultures have developed their own tomato varieties – Held’s got a delicious Couer de Boeuf from France and a Canestrino DiLucca from Italy. Still, he’s seen American heirloom names pop up in a number of counties, including during a trip to France last year when he found one woman selling heirloom seeds like Brandywine and Green Zebra.

Besides saving seeds from his own garden, Held also trades with other gardeners through the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, a nonprofit group dedicated to the preservation of heirloom plant varieties.

Saving Seeds: A Tutorial

If you’ve run into some tasty tomatoes and want to try saving some of the seeds for next year, time is running out with the winding down of the season. Keep in mind that the seeds of hybrid tomatoes won’t produce the same fruits, so save the seeds of heirloom tomatoes, which will be genetically true to their parent plants.

Royer Held at his Project Grow garden, where he grows heirloom tomatoes. (Photo by the writer.)

Some experts recommend soaking the seeds in water, a method to help get rid of some plant diseases. This involves soaking the seeds in water until a smelly mold forms in two to four days. Scrape off the mold and rinse the seeds.

Held simply takes the seeds he wants to save and washes them through a screen to wash off the gel that encases them and inhibits germination.

In either method, when the seeds are clean, let them dry completely. Though Held stores them in plastic bags, he says paper is fine, too. He writes a description of the tomatoes on each bag, including the color and dimensions of the fruit, along with a description of the taste.

Held says he likes a tomato taste that balances the acids and sugars, as well as has a creamy texture. It’s tough for him to choose a favorite, though this year he’s partial to Orange Russian 117, a bicolor oxheart variety.

Trautmann also ponders the question of her favorite tomato. How a tomato tastes can change year to year depending on weather and soil, she says. In general, says Trautmann, “I like a tomato with flavor.”

Both she and Held are working on stabilizing a strain of the hybrid Old Brooks. Held is developing a yellow tomato called Gold Brooks; Trautmann is looking at a variety she calls Tropical Brooks that she says tastes a little salty.

Held is trying to see if he can develop a green oxheart tomato, but that requires time, patience and a working knowledge of botany. In an open air garden, it’s difficult to find the time and patience to pollinate tomato flowers with pollen from a specific plant.

The trick is all in the timing, Held says, and takes a skill that natural pollinators have perfected.

Says Held: “I’m a terrible bee.” 

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

Cecilia Sauter’s rain garden solved the problem of a wet and mushy side yard at her Ann Arbor home and may have helped her neighbor with water in her house’s foundation. Greg Marker, of Ypsilanti, uses a rain garden to hold runoff from three sump pumps and his house’s gutters, which resolves some water problems with his neighbors who live down the hill from him.

I just wanted to get rid of some lawn.

The thread that ties the three of us together is that we got help from Washtenaw County’s Office of Water Resources Commissioner (formerly the Drain Commissioner), which provided us with rain garden designs and helped us buy the native plants called for by the plans. The county’s program started in 2005, and so far it’s helped set up about 50 rain gardens. 

No, a rain garden doesn’t grow precipitation. It takes care of water running off roofs and driveways, or pooling where no one wants water to pool. Basically, you dig a shallow bed  – 3 inches deep with a flat bottom – and direct the rain into the bed where it can soak into the soil instead of running into the storm drains or making a mess in your basement.

With a rain garden, the water soaks slowly into the soil and ultimately into the ground water, instead of cascading down the storm drains and into local streams and rivers, taking things like fertilizers with it. There’s a bit of extra incentive for Ann Arbor residents: For homes with a rain garden, the city utilities department will cut your water and sewer bill by $2.80 every quarter.

Sauter’s rain garden accommodates the precipitation that falls on her roof and about half her next-door neighbor’s roof. The downspouts were routed underground and now empty into the rain garden that sprawls across the length of her back yard.

Cecelia Sauter and her dog Snowy in the the back yard of her northeast Ann Arbor home, where she has put in a rain garden.

The rain garden is constructed so that water fills up one end of the bed, then spills into the other half. That happened the first year, Sauter said, but this year, even with all the rain that fell this spring, the first half of the garden has pretty much taken care of all the water.

Now her side yard is dry, said Sauter, and another neighbor, who used to have a wet foundation in the rainy seasons, now seems to have no problems. As an added plus, there are plants blooming in her yard all season, from wild geraniums to the Joe Pye weed. ”It is awesome,” said Sauter.

Marker, a civil engineer, knows something about water, and he had an idea of how to channel the rain that would run off his property and onto his downhill neighbors. The pear-shaped rain garden he installed several years ago handles runoff from his entire roof, as well as the water from three sump pumps that carry water from the footing drains under his basement.

Before the rain garden, all that water “left me with a soggy yard,” said Marker. In the winter, “the sump water would come out (of the ground) two or three houses down and ice up.” Now the water goes into the rain garden and soaks more slowly into the soil.

There was a slight problem with the rain garden in the winter, when the ground froze. Though the outside temperature was below freezing, the water pumped up from underground was a steady 58 degrees, Marker said, and it just ran out over the frozen garden.

But Marker set up a system of valves, and each winter he redirects the sump water from the rain garden to a pipe that takes it to the storm drain that runs under the nearby street. Each spring, he directs the sump water back in the garden, where it warms the soil and gives an early boost to the plants there.

The county rain garden project is run by Harry Sheehan, an environmental manager at Water Resources, who came to my house last summer to start the process of building my rain garden. His office provided a landscape designer, Janis Das of InSite Design, who came up with the shape of the garden and a selection of native plants. (This year, the county will use Master Gardeners to design the gardens.)

Sheehan also helped me lay out the design on my lawn and had an intern with a Rototiller available to help rip up the grass. I also got a discount on the plants, which were purchased through the county. The design was meant to capture the water coming off half my roof and from one of my neighbor’s downspouts. The water normally runs along one side of the driveway, and now that water should run through a rock-filled trench into the rain garden.

I was responsible for digging the bed, which had to be at least 3 inches deep and flat. Flat. That’s what had me standing in the yard, raking the bed like one of those little Zen gardens. I would rake, then measure, then rake, then move the stakes used to measure the depth and rake again.

It gave me a chance to get caught up with my neighbors, who all wanted to know if I was installing a pond  – ”A koi pond?” asked one neighbor. It’s planted now, and if Sauter and Marker are to be believed, the sweetspire, anemones and geraniums will be handling quite a bit of water that would normally run into the street’s storm drain.

The plants in the rain garden have to be able to take the hot, sunny conditions of high summer in my front yard, which faces southwest. But they also have to handle a rush of rain water that can come anytime from April to October.

I’ve mulched it all, but I expect there will be some small touches – such as adding a pile of rocks for contast and making the garden look a little less like a volcano (a neighbor’s description – I didn’t see it until he said it). I’ve also got to get out there and pull up the many maple seedlings that have recently sprung up.

After the last few heavy rains, I think the only change I’ll make is to enlarge the trench that leads into the rain garden bed. 

The county has posted more information online, including a video tour of several local rain gardens installed under the program, with a list of plants and the garden designs. This year, Sheehan plans on helping another 10 rain gardens become reality. If you’re interested, email him at sheehanh@ewashtenaw.org to see if you can get on his list. 

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.

Marianne Rzepka

We have had a whole bunch of the stuff that brings May flowers in the past few weeks, so a lot of gardeners have spent time indoors, hoping that the necessary showers won’t wash out the tender tulips, daffodils, crocuses and other spring-blooming bulbs that have already started to bloom.

Some would-be gardeners wish they had some showy spring bulbs to worry about. But though they missed the first wave of fall-planted bulbs, they shouldn’t worry, because they can plant some summer-blooming
flora now.

These bulbs, tubers and corms give a great show when they bloom. The downside is they can’t survive our tough winters. That’s why we have to put them in the ground in the spring. Some bulbs need some cold weather before they’ll bloom, and that’s why Miami doesn’t have a tulip festival. But summer-bloomers like gladiolas, dahlia, calla and canna just can’t take that kind of refrigeration. Leave them in the ground through the winter and you’ll most likely get squat the next summer.

If you’ve got lots of time in the fall, dig them up, store them in a cool basement and plant them again the next year. Or just treat them like annuals, planting them, along with the pansies and impatiens, in the spring.

Barb and Tom Kraft usually plant some canna in pots on their deck. They don’t have a lot of other spring-blooming bulbs, because they’re often too busy selling them just when they should be planting them.

Tom works for Vandenberg Bulb Inc., a family-based business in Howell that operates as a distributor for plants and garden supplies. Besides the spring-blooming bulbs, the company also offers perennials such as hostas, bleeding heart and astilbe. It’s a wholesaler, but you can find its products in stores in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

Tom  started working for the now-defunct Neilsen’s greenhouses when he was still in high school, went to horticultural school in Chicago and was a grower for several greenhouses before he started his job with Vandenberg.

Barb and Tom Kraft

You can find Barb at Downtown Home & Garden in downtown Ann Arbor. Local gardeners know Downtown Home & Garden as the place where they can just pull into the former feed mill’s 100-year-old building to load up bags of compost, mulch or fertilizer. Just don’t run over any of those other pesky customers.

(Full disclosure: The Krafts live about two blocks from me, near Argo Park. Their two sons, now students at Michigan Technical University, delivered my Ann Arbor News years ago.)

Except for some miniature gladiolas, Tom couldn’t think of a spring-planted bulb that could reliably stay in the ground through the winter. If we have a mild winter or the bulbs are in a protected spot where the ground won’t freeze, you might see a gladiola or calla come up again the next spring.

Otherwise, if you want to see them again, you’ll have to dig up the bulb, corm or tuber in the fall, then store them somewhere they won’t freeze, sprout or grow mold until spring comes around again. Even now, you could wait a little before planting. The ground’s not likely to freeze again this year, but the bulbs won’t really start growing until the ground gets a little warmer, said Tom. And the longer they sit in the ground, the more likely that rot will set in.

If you want, you can start these bulbs off in pots and plant them when it gets warmer out, Tom said. Gladiolas and cannas are pretty easy to grow and can cost from $1.99 to $4.99 for fancier varieties, such as the striped Bengal Tiger canna. At  that price, you won’t go broke if you forget to water them in the heat of the summer or passing deer eat them to the ground.

Dahlias are a bit pricier and more fragile, Barb said. “You have to spend time with them.”

Elephant ear, a caladium, might be tempting for new gardeners, but Tom says it is a bit of a challenge. It grows quite slowly and needs a lot of warm temperatures to look like the plants you see in the advertising.

You won’t find that kind of climate in Michigan, and that’s why the annual caladium festival is in Lake Placid, Florida. 

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.  

Marianne Rzepka

Winter is so over. And what was all that about, anyway?

Gardeners have no time to fret over winter anymore. The time for looking at catalogs and polishing up pruner blades is over. It’s also past time for cruising through garden stores, peering at seed packets and picking through boxes of gladiola bulbs.

It’s time for getting out, for appreciating the early spring flowers (note to self: more crocuses and chinodoxia next year), clearing out the debris of leaves, windblown newspapers and fallen branches, maybe even cleaning out the garage on a warm day. It’s a maddening time of year: One week snow is covering your daffodils; the next temperatures hit 70s. You can’t be fooled by either extreme.

On those cold, wet days, you stay home and swear. On those warm and sunny days, you just have to get outside. In the past few weeks, I’ve been knocking around my yard like an outdoor Roomba, peering at the buds and new leaves on my lilac and redbud tree. I squint along the ground, looking for the first signs of emerging bloodroot and hepatica – the cutest of the cute spring blooms.

“There is some serious garden fever out there,” says LeighAnn Phillips-Knope, the incoming coordinator for garden activities and volunteer services at Project Grow, Ann Arbor’s community garden program.

It’s understandable. After the long, cold winter, “We need our connection with the earth again,” says Phillips-Knope. Landscape gardeners can look at their yards and either appreciate their planning or bewail their mistakes – no more daylilies, thank you – but there are limits to what can be done now. You might be able to transplant a few things, or put in some bushes, but the tender annuals have to wait until May to go outside. If you’ve planted petunias in containers, you’d better cover them on frosty nights.

In many cases, vegetable gardeners can thumb their noses at light morning frosts and ignore the weak spring snows. Several weeks ago, Phillips-Knope planted cold-weather vegetables like lettuce, radishes, beets and kale, as well as potatoes and onions.

Bloodroot, an early sign of spring.

The first seeds  that Sheri Repucci, Project Grow’s outgoing coordinator, puts in the ground are peas. As soon as you can stick your finger in the soil, you can plant peas, she says. Of course, these are people with home gardens. I’m still waiting to get out into my Project Grow garden as soon as the plots are staked sometime this month. That’s when I can start my own row of peas, onions, spinach and lettuce.

Some vegetables will have to wait until late May, when the threat of frost is over. As usual, I’ve started tomato plants inside under fluorescent lights. Usually, I plant the seeds straight into a seeding mix. This year, inspired by a Project Grow class on tomatoes and peppers, I sprouted some seeds in a wet paper towel. They’re already in their peat pots and seem to be doing well. I plan to put them in the garden come Memorial Day weekend. 

Now is the time to sow a row of lettuce or spinach. If you want to harvest cherry tomatoes in your backyard or on your balcony, keep an eye out for upcoming plant sales – Matthaei Botanical Gardens will have their annual sale May 9 and 10 with annuals, perennials and some vegetables for sale.

Pick a sunny spot, add some compost (it comes in a bag) and make sure whatever you plant gets enough water. The worst you can get is a dead plant, but you just might end up with a tomato.

And if you wish you had some color in your lawn right now, you’re a few months too late. What you can do is write “get bulbs” in your calendar for early September. Get tulips, get daffodils, get hyacinths and plant them in the ground. In a year – gardens are long-term projects – you’ll be glad you did. 

About the writer: Marianne Rzepka, former reporter for the Ann Arbor News and Detroit Free Press, is a Master Gardener who lives in Ann Arbor and thinks it’s fun to turn the compost pile.