Vegetables to take over City Hall gardens

Baltimore City, which sometimes carries a poor-cousin chip on its shoulder when it comes to the nation's capital, is about to trump the city to the south.

Mayor Sheila Dixon is planning to turn the formal gardens in front of City Hall into vegetable gardens covering about 2,000 square feet. First lady Michelle Obama's South Lawn vegetable garden only measures 1,100 square feet.

"This was being planned before the White House," said Dixon, firmly. "We are not copying!"

The city will be using decorative urns, about 70 window boxes and several formal raised beds with both spring and summer vegetable crops that will benefit Our Daily Bread, which feeds about 700 to 800 people a day and often finds itself, even in summer, relying on canned vegetables.
"We have a cook who is thrilled," said Kerrie Burch-DeLuca, director of communications for the soup kitchen.

When asked how many recipes she had for Swiss chard, a favorite element in the design for the City Hall gardens, she laughed.

"We will find some," she said. "Nothing will go begging. This is our happy day."

City Hall's move to edible gardening reflects the growing interest in vegetable gardening this year as consumers try to deal with a tough economy and concerns about health and food safety. California first lady Maria Shriver announced plans this week for a vegetable garden around the state house in Sacramento.

The vegetable gardens in downtown Baltimore will extend from the porches of City Hall across War Memorial Plaza to Gay Street. Planting is scheduled to begin Saturday.

"We have an opportunity to do something right here in front of City Hall," said the mayor. "We have a chance to lead by example and to inspire residents, to show that in an urban environment you can still maintain healthy eating."

The City Hall vegetable gardens will be more than bountiful -- producing a conservative estimate of $3,000 worth of everything from kale to corn.

They will be beautiful, too, said Angela Treadwell-Palmer, a landscape designer who planned the garden.

She at first envisioned a couple of small demonstration gardens. "I was thinking we could just show how pretty vegetables could be," she said. But Bill Vondrasek, head of horticulture for the city's Department of Parks and Recreation, loved the idea and told her to run with it.

"The mayor set the tone with her cleaner, greener, safer, healthier Baltimore," Vondrasek said. "When you have her support, you start thinking about what you can do.

Although the scope of the city's vegetable garden may seem ambitious, Vondrasek said "the areas that will have vegetables are the same areas that the horticultural staff plants with annuals every year."

This year, the city will have extra help from the master gardeners who volunteer at the Cylburn Arboretum on Greenspring Avenue. Because of construction of the new visitors center this year, there is no vegetable garden and they have some free time on their hands.

"This is a big effort on our part, as you might imagine," said Allan DeGray, a master gardener and volunteer with Cylburn who lives, coincidentally, in Gardenville in the city.

The Cylburn volunteers will maintain the beds, rotate the crops from spring to summer vegetables and harvest the produce weekly so there is nothing on the ground to attract rodents -- one of the mayor's chief concerns. Water trucks that normally maintain the city's plantings will handle the watering.

"San Francisco did something similar last year," said Treadwell-Palmer, whose company, Plants Nouveau, introduces new plants to the market. "And when you think about it, this isn't a whole lot more trouble than maintaining the bulbs and the annuals the city plants."

Treadwell-Palmer's plans are ambitious and her designs are classic.
The enormous urns at the feet of the City Hall steps will be planted with sweet potatoes and black pearl peppers. The 70 window boxes on the balustrade beneath the flags and in front of the bronze doors will be planted with a lime-green Swiss chard and more black pearl peppers.

Two of the beds near the parking lot will be demonstration vegetable gardens. "They are the perfect size for rowhouse vegetable gardens, and we'll plant the kinds of things that can produce enough food for a family of four," said Treadwell-Palmer.

The Cylburn volunteers hope to be there at lunch time during the week to answer questions from visitors about growing their own vegetables.

In the beds around the flagpoles, gardeners will plant edible ornamentals: red mustard greens, red kale and leeks.
There will be rhubarb and cucumbers, acorn squash, cabbage, lettuce, peppers and zinnias for cutting along the fence that overlooks War Memorial Plaza (which will not be planted with vegetables because it is the site of summer festivals.)

Perhaps the most charming aspect of Treadwell-Palmer's plan is for the four classic potage gardens. The raised planters will be planted with an "X" of herbs, including Italian parsley, sage, lavender and rosemary.

And the four quadrants the herbs create will be filled with kohlrabi, beets, celery, radishes, carrots, onions, eggplant and zucchini.

The farthest beds, across Gay Street from the War Memorial Building, will have elaborate bamboo trellises for cherry tomatoes, and stripes of red and green lettuce, to be replaced with summer crops of okra, collard greens and sweet corn, and with sweet potatoes tucked underneath.

The biggest concern, said DeGray, is vandalism.

"If people are hungry and want something to eat, that's one thing," he said. "After all, the gardens are there for the people of Baltimore. We just hope no one damages the gardens."

The master gardeners from Cylburn gave Treadwell-Palmer a wish list of vegetables and she used the design skills she learned at the University of Delaware to design a showpiece for the city.

"They had to show me that they could do this in a way that would benefit the city," said Dixon, who gave her blessing after she received assurances that the gardens would be maintained in a way to discourage rodents -- and that her beloved tulips would remain.

"We will be planting the cool-weather crops in between the tulips," said Vondrasek. "About the time the tulips are done, we will be harvesting the lettuces and putting in the summer crops."

Will the mayor, who described herself as a "gardener-in-learning," be out in her new vegetable gardens, rake and pruners in hand?

"Possibly," she said.