Strawberries in a Shoe...The Best Gifts Come From Nature

Last week I was lucky to work with six incredible kids and 17 adult volunteers to do thinning, transplanting, and maintenance at Cavanagh Community Center’s permaculture garden on 8th Street, between F & G Streets. We sent home 110 plant starts, including 75 strawberry starts.

In this season of gift-giving, I can’t stop thinking about how many gifts are given to us by plants each day: food, clean air, beauty, medicine. Plants easily and freely replicate themselves and grow fruits to nourish us day in, day out.

For those who haven’t ever experienced a permaculture garden, let me take you on a mini-tour. A permaculture garden incorporates low-water edibles into a multi-layered, lush, multi-colored landscape design. In the case of the Cavanagh Center, Daily Acts has put in kid-friendly plants like a fig tree, a “Satsuma” mandarin orange tree, plus a full and lush strawberry bed, espaliered apple trees and more!

A water-harvesting pathway, known as a swale, contours around the entire landscape, so kids can stroll through the garden, safely away from the street and out of the way of pedestrians in the sidewalk. Kids in permaculture gardens tend to stay safely out of the street because they are so engaged by the diversity of colors, scents and things to look at in the garden.

In this garden, there are the Jerusalem Sage plants, not blooming right now, but which in the spring will be full of beautiful yellow flowers full of nectar for kids to satisfy their sweet tooth on. The honeybees love them too! There is aloe, which will come in handy for soothing sun-kissed skin on those hot summer days we look forward to next year.

We toiled away last Saturday, all 22 of us, kids working hand in hand with grown-ups, all of us learning and teaching. No matter how old, we know we each have a unique and special perspective to share. We dead-headed plants, pruned back old growth from trees and shrubs, thinned out the strawberry bed, transplanted medicinal herbs like yarrow, and planted new plants like Agave, Variegated mint.

And as we left, satisfied and exhausted from a full morning’s work, I noticed that two of my fellow volunteers had taken with them one of the strawberry starts in an old shoe they’d found littered at the Center. Turning trash into treasure, and big smiles across their faces, I imagined the future of all those strawberry plants and the food and fun they’ll bring to these families next spring.

I’m reminded of this lovely essay on giving by the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran,  “You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give…You often say, ‘I would give, but only to the deserving.’ The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.”

Petalumans are like plants, we give and give and give (money, time, ideas, energy, gifts) so that we can continue to have a vibrant city, amazing nonprofit organizations, and deep-rooted connections with one another. I am so thankful to have grown up in such a wonderful place, and now to have a job in this incredible city.