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Though the heat rose with the sun, gardeners and park volunteers enthusiastically greeted visitors to the Farmers Branch Community Garden July 23.
Master gardener Ann Rogers willingly paused her watering to provide a tour of the garden as part of the Community Garden Demo the Farmers Branch Parks and Recreation Department offered as part of the national Parks and Recreation month.
She delighted in showing off different gardeners’ vegetables and flowers as well as sharing the benefits of the different types of beds the garden provides. Some are at differing heights and with sitting benches so people with mobility issues can reach or sit down as needed. One bed is higher than expected so people with head or neck injuries who need to stand can still garden.
The main aggregate pathway allows people with wheelchairs or walkers to navigate as well.
Four pollinator beds, which Rogers helps maintain, provide sanctuary for bees and other pollinators. The community garden also has an orchard and includes large, fruit-bearing trees and vines that include persimmons, apricots, pears, peaches, apples, figs and grapes.
“It’s the year of the fig,” Rogers said. In a matter of minutes, she filled a tray with samples from three different varieties of figs.
In her own bed, Rogers has been enriching the soil with legumes, especially black-eyed peas, which thrive in the summer heat. Legumes fix nitrogen into the soil, making it more fertile for other plants. She showed David Jones, chair of the Farmers Branch Parks & Recreation Committee, a peanut plant, she’d started experimentally. She said the peanuts would grow beneath the ground on the plant’s roots.
“It’s the cheapest therapy you’ll ever have,” Patty Lassen, who rents three plots with her sister, said of gardening. “It’s addictive.”
Natsumi Inaba of Japan was in town to visit Rogers and do other things, but said she really appreciates the Farmers Branch Community Garden. She gardens at her home in Japan, as do others, but it’s for personal or even market use.
“I’m very impressed with this community. I think it’s a good way to help people in need,” she said.
Every Wednesday and Saturday mornings, volunteers harvest and weigh their bounty, which is delivered to Metrocrest Services.
Inaba said she came to the Dallas area for other reasons and was happy to learn of the community garden. “I’m not interested in sight-seeing,” she said. Instead, she wants to learn more about how to organize a gardening community at home and how to raise her visibility.
In addition, Barbara Leedy, a board member on the Farmers Branch Parks & Recreation Board, demonstrated how to create mosquito bait stations that homeowners can use to reduce the mosquito population on their properties.
Leedy recommended filling a small, 1- or 3-gallon bucket with some type of weeds or greens and water and adding a quarter of a mosquito dunk. The greens decompose, giving off carbon dioxide, which draws mosquitoes. The mosquitoes lay their eggs in the water. The dunk contains the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis subspecies israelensis, which contains spores that are toxic to the larvae of mosquitoes (and fungus gnats and blackflies), stopping the mosquito breeding process before the mosquitoes mature.
“I have these in my yard, and they do work,” Leedy said.
Leedy suggested adding a stick “in case a critter you don’t to drown falls in, it can crawl out.”
She said not to let the bait bucket go dry and recommended checking the bucket every three weeks for water and the dunk.
She said for the average Farmers Branch lot, one bucket in the front yard and one in the back should be ample. She said she has a large yard and has multiple bait buckets along the back of her property as well as in her garden.
“I have one right next to my back door,” she said. “I’d rather overdo it. Especially since the city gives these [dunks] away two at a time… when we spray for mosquitoes, we kill everything else too.”
The Farmers Branch Community Garden has 60 plots available for rent. Rogers thought two or three are currently available.
Interested gardeners can fill out an online form on the city’s website or call for more information.
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