Potato-Patch Plans

Some fragmented thoughts on community gardens, a renegade Republican mayor of Detroit, Solanum tuberosum, homemade pizza, and the first book I've read in a while

The 72nd Day of Coronatide*
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Hey friend,

After we found our rental house in Grand Rapids and before we moved, my mother-in-law, who has become a deft Googler and hunter/gatherer of online information, texted to ask if I’d heard about the community garden a few blocks away. I had not.

Call it fate or destiny or the grace of a God who knows the heart of a pretend farmer: the largest community garden in town was just a short walk from our new house. Last week, I got my plot at the Hillcrest Community Garden. On Tuesday, Fozzie came with me to start planting our 25x25 patch of dirt. My rent: $33 for the season.

As a young journalist in London, I used to pass allotment gardens—the British equivalent of our community gardens—all the time. I’d find them tucked here and there, greenery bursting out of improbably small spaces amidst brick and concrete. They often held remarkable diversity, the stories of faded Empire tangling like the vines of unstaked peas. In East London, where I lived, Bangladeshi ladies might grow calabash and coriander next to English pensioners cultivating currants and chard next to an immigrant from Hong Kong tending choy sum and bitter melon.

England’s allotment gardens sprang from different forms of loss and deprivation. In the 17th and 18th centuries, huge expanses of land once held and used in common were hedged and fenced off, and access for cultivation restricted to rich landowners. In the countryside, a “right to dig” movement secured growing space for the poor and landless. In the fast-growing cities of the Industrial Revolution, the picture was more complex: In some places, peasants drawn to the cities for work could rent space to grow vegetables. But many Victorian-era urban allotments were also devoted to the delight of middle-class people, who had little green space in crowded London. Some built tiny cottages in their allotments and used them for the 19th-century versions of summer staycations.

In the U.S., much of the history of community gardens is likewise tied to economic struggle—and one of the country’s first community-garden efforts blossomed a few hours from Grand Rapids. In the 1890s, after two decades of prosperity, a commodity-price collapse and a run on banks plunged the U.S. into recession. Michigan’s unemployment rate spiked past 40%. Amidst the downturn, Detroit Mayor Hazen Pingree devised a plan to lend vacant plots to the destitute so that they could grow their own vegetables. 

Pingree knew hunger. Reared in a poor family of farmers in Maine, he spent months in a Confederate prison in Georgia while serving as a Union soldier—an ordeal that left him with a firsthand understanding of an empty stomach and a chronic disability. After the war, he moved to Detroit, became a cobbler, grew his shoe business into one of America’s largest, and then was recruited by the Republicans to run for mayor.

Pingree’s initiative incensed his fellow Republicans. Some claimed it would reward the lazy. Others urged the mayor to keep this land, which would teem with peasants and poor immigrants, far from their stately homes. One opponent warned that the plots, which would largely be used to grow potatoes, would invite an invasion of potato bugs.

He tried to rally Detroit’s rich churches to support what became known as his “potato patch plan.” He hoped they’d donate funds for seeds and tools. According to historian Melvin Holli, who wrote an account of Pingree’s mayoralty called Reform in Detroit, a Pingree aide told a reporter: “The Mayor proposes to find out if those elegant churches are only for show or for doing some real good.” The city’s tall-steeple congregations teamed up to give the grand sum of $13.80—the equivalent of $411 today.

The mayor sold one of his own racehorses to help fund potato patches—a publicity stunt, yes, but one that successfully jumpstarted the effort. That first season, nearly 1,000 families grew crops on 430 acres that the city cobbled together for their use. Two seasons later, more than 1,500 families participated.

Pingree became a fierce advocate for the working class and the poor. During a bitter transportation strike, for instance, he sided with unions against the private companies that ran Detroit’s trolley lines and successfully forced the firms to lower the price of a trolley ride. But his advocacy had personal costs. “As a final insult,” the labor historian Steve Babson writes in his book Working Detroit, “he lost his family pew in the prestigious Woodward Avenue Baptist Church.” (That congregation is now defunct.)

Pingree’s activism imperiled his relationships with the corporate class, but it won him significant voter support. In 1897, he was elected Michigan’s governor. His time in that office was marked by discord with his own party. Months before dying four years later, he reflected on his political life. “I could have had the praise and support of our ‘best citizens’ and our ‘best society,’” he said, “if I had upheld those who have for years attempted to control legislation in their own interests, to the end that they might be relieved from sharing equally with the poor and lowly the burden of taxation.” He then slammed leaders who perpetuated “the present system of unjust, inequitable, and iniquitous laws... to the detriment of the great masses of the laboring classes.”** 

I know I’ve wandered far from where I began, so let’s return to my community garden.

I heard the other day that demand this year was higher than ever for plots in our community garden. Some people have more time now that we’re (still) in lockdown. Some are thinking more about where their food comes from, since most of us have encountered gaps in the supplies of something or other at the grocery store. Some have run the numbers and realized that it will be prudent to grow some of their own produce. Some hope it will help their health to dig in the dirt and nurture new life.

For me, it’s all that and more. 

When Fozzie and I were in the garden on Tuesday, we weren’t alone. A large Spanish-speaking family examined their plot, planning what would go where. A textbook hipster spread compost in his area. Jan, who helps tend the compost pile, was planting some melon in hers. There are gay families and straight ones, old people and young, folks who have been in Michigan for generations and some like us who just arrived.

We aren’t all human either. Worms wriggled their complaint when I disturbed the soil they call home. A killdeer skittered across a tilled field. Robins pecked at a plot covered with straw and mulch. Neighbors strolled by with their dogs; when Fozzie first came to us, we weren’t sure he could bark, but I guess he was just saving it all for a tiny, yappy, Schnauzer-like thing that dared pass by. Community can be annoying.

Fozzie at peace in the garden on Tuesday, before he freaked out on that yappy little dog

It’s funny to me that we call this space a “community garden.” Once, that phrase would have been redundant. Once, there was no other kind. 

In the creation narratives in the Book of Genesis, a garden was humanity’s first home. It was a place where they experienced God, a sanctuary filled with reminders of grace, and a space shared with all manner of creature. A garden can still be that for us. But the neighborhood rabbits had better stay away from my carrots.

What I’m Growing: Recently, I mentioned my love of potato chips. (Except Lays. Let me reiterate my disdain for Lays.) Really, it’s a general affection for the potato. I’ll eat potatoes in almost any form. Ask my husband: I’ve even eaten soggy, day-old fries straight out of the fridge. I blame the indoctrination of my grandma, who never threw anything out, but somehow, the sad fry also helps me remember the goodness that once was, memory mitigating the deterioration. Anyway, I got seed potatoes from a local nursery and planted them yesterday. I’m already dreaming of roasted potatoes, their edges bashed, then crisped in bacon fat. Mashed potatoes, drenched in gravy. My friend Beth’s family specialty, “the potatoes of wonderfulness,” so called because they’re bathed and baked in cream and parmesan cheese. If you have a favorite potato recipe, tell me what it is and why you love it.

What I’m Cooking: I made some failed sourdough English muffins last weekend. They didn’t rise properly. Also, my griddle must have been too hot; the outside turned golden but the inside was still doughy, and I kept imagining how Paul Hollywood would judge me for that with his dagger eyes. More successful: strawberry-rhubarb ice cream. We’ve also been trying our hand at homemade pizza. (Pic of first try below.) We’ve had okay pizza in Grand Rapids, but we miss what we get out East. [Ducks for cover from Grand Rapids pizza apologists.] One of the best pizzerias Tristan has ever been to is Pizzeria Beddia in Philadelphia. We’ve been using the dough recipe from its pizzaiolo, Joe Beddia, author of the excellent cookbook Pizza Camp. It takes patience, but it works. The oven in our rental is basic; it has no top broiler, so I’ve had to experiment with timing and heat. Tonight, we’ll do a white pizza with poplar mushroom, asparagus, caramelized onion, and goat cheese (Michigan asparagus is superb) and probably a simple Margherita. Here’s Joe Beddia’s dough recipe.

What I’m Reading: Last year, while we were traveling—remember those ancient times, when we could travel?—I bought a copy of The Overstory, by Richard Powers. Since then, I’ve looked at it many times, by which I mean I’ve peered at the cover as it sits, shaming me, in some pile of books. I know lots of people are having personal book festivals during Coronatide, but this time has sapped my focus. Reading is hard. It has taken so much discipline to read anything longer than a tweet or a caption. But I finally put my phone down and picked the book up. I’m about 100 pages in. So many trees! So many gorgeous sentences! So many words I don’t know, yet I don’t feel dumb not knowing them! Have you read it? I’d love your thoughts. (No spoilers, please!)

That’s all for this week. As always, you can email me at jeff@byjeffchu.com; I read each message with gratitude, even if it takes me a while to respond. And I’m so glad we can stumble through this together. I’ll try to write more soon. 

Much love,
Jeff

p.s. Coming next week: a conversation with two brilliant thinkers and teachers on grief and mourning amidst Coronatide. 

*I’m counting my days from March 10th, when my governor, Gretchen Whitmer—also known as That Woman in Michigan, First of Her Name, the Embattled—declared a state of emergency. Though some of Michigan is reopening, many of us are wary. So, for the love of God and the sake of our neighbors, may we continue to #StayHome.

**History and government geeks, read Hazen Pingree’s entire final gubernatorial address here. It feels so contemporary for something 119 years old. He names corruption in the criminal-justice system. He calls expanded voting hours a “matter of simple justice to the largest class of citizens.” And he urges that land be restored to a band of Native Americans “ousted from the lands owned by them”—and also pushes for the state to “restore all of the buildings and other property which may have been destroyed or damaged... to place the Indians back in their homes in the same condition as they were before they were ousted.” This fine primer on Pingree’s time as Detroit mayor is by Bill Loomis, who often writes on local history for the Detroit News.