Gardens, Gangstas, And Freedom
This prison is different than the other joints I've been to.
Last year they started a garden club here. For ten dollars, you get a 10x10 foot plot of land, a bag full of seeds, and something productive to do in an otherwise meaningless existence. In order to be eligible for this club, you have to be a year ticket free (no disciplinary infractions), and that's about it. Well, other than a willingness to get dirty and do some work. Oh, and you have to donate ten pounds of your harvest to a local food pantry at the end of the season. Win-Win.
When I got here last year, I was still heavily affiliated, (if you know what I mean) and though I had been looking for my way out for sometime, I still had one foot in and one foot in the lotus position. Basically I was too busy being affiliated for extracurricular activities. A year ago my concerns were slightly heavier than watering plants and pulling weeds.
Well a lot has changed in the last year. None more important than finally cutting all ties of affiliation with any organization in here, well other than the notorious Garden Boyz!, that is. (No, but seriously; I have to watch what, I say. Everything is monitored) With my decision for complete independence secured, I was now free to do anything I wanted.
So, I signed up for the garden club.
I paid my ten dollars, and was assigned a 9x8 foot patch of dirt. My dirt. Sure I got shorted on the square footage, but this is prison: you rarely get what what's owed to you.
Most of the women in my life have dabbled in gardening, whether it was growing corn and squash on an empty plot of land in the neighborhood, or a couple of potted tomatoes plants on an apartment balcony. I however, have never grown anything, with the exception of a massive weed plant behind my parents house, and a laundry list of bad habits. So, since marijuana seeds and cigarettes weren't included in the brown paper bag, I had to begin my gardening career knowing next to nothing about growing these plants.
What they did give us in the paper bag was stuff like: head lettuce, white and red onion bulbs, pearl onions, carrots, cabbage, spinach, straight cucumbers, green peppers, banana peppers, beets, radishes, egg plant, zucchini, squash, beef steak and cherry tomatoes.
It was up to us to choose what we wanted to plant in our limited space; a twinge of freedom. But as all you Green Thumbs know, there's plenty to do before the seeds actually go into the ground.
Before we were allowed to enter the garden area, located in the center of the compound, we had to wait for the words: "Garden Club," to appear on our daily itinerary. I don't know what took them so long, but for weeks after signing up, and after being issued our plots, we were forced to sit, idly by, while the growable days of the season slipped past. The only people allowed in that fertile patch of land in the center of the prison were a handful of 'Yard Crew porters,' whose job it is to help manage all the gardening related duties. The Green Thumb Mafia.
Some of grizzled Garden Vets, from the previous year, told us rookies that before we could plant anything we still had things to do. We had to 'turn over' our plots, go on a search and destroy mission for grubs, root out the insurgent weeds, carpet bomb our soil with 'milky spore' to kill the locals, and finally we had to section off our plots with tiny wooden steaks and yarn.
With so much left to do before getting to the actual business of planting veggies, and with valuable time ticking away while we were held back by the rules of engagement, a few of us decided, in line with prison etiquette/corruption, to pay the bribe, proposed by one of the garden porters to start prepping our plots for us.
The going rate for the deluxe treatment was three dollars, which included all the preparations mentioned by the Garden Vets, plus some extra compost, and access to plants not included in our starter bags. All in all it cost me a bag of instant rice and two Ramen soups. Which left me a dollar short, but I assured our corrupt/opportunistic garden porter that I'd get him the other dollar at some point in the not so distant future. I figured 'two bucks' in food to get a jump on planting season was well worth it.
This was Pay to Play prison gardening.
Finally, we all got our Garden Club itineraries. The next day, armed with my MP3 player and a brown paper bag of bulbs and seeds, I marched out to war. But first, you have to stand in line at a tiny, sweltering, shack to get your uniform. Some poor garden porter slowly roasts to death while handing out the fluorescent vests we're forced to wear in the garden area, and any garden tools we might need.
Make it to the shack early enough and you'll get a decent vest. The best ones are made of a silky orange mesh, like a basketball or football jersey. They're light, loose, and comfortable. Show up too late and you'll be forced to wear one of the bright pink pull-over vests. These wiry torture devices are made of some sort of rubbery plastic, starched into a rigid square shape. It makes you look like some sort of cheaply dressed, flamboyantly gay, Halloween robot. Or you could just let your plants wither and die from dehydration. It's a hell of a choice, and I've often found myself lowering that abrasive pink contraption over my head for the sake of my garden.
I got my vest, (one of the good ones) and with the crumpled brown paper bag in hand, I headed to my garden; plot 72. Inside the bag were fifty white onion bulbs and the assortment of seeds that I would use to bring my garden to life. And in case I'd forgot that I was in prison, all of the seeds were tucked inside pieces of paper, origamied in the exact same way that heroin dealers fold up their dope. I doubt the tomatoes seeds at Home Depot look like packs of heroin, but what do I know?
With Bob Marley wailing his songs of redemption through my prison issued headphones, I got down in the dirt, and with a little help from my veteran friends, I started mapping out the plot, and planting the future.
I got the soil wet and pressed my thumb into the earth, every four inches, in four of the ‘straight-ish' lines I could muster. It was still too early in the season for the tomato and pepper plants, so I filled each thumb hole with a little white onion bulb. I drew two shallow lines with my index finger and sprinkled in the spinach seeds. I used the same technique to make a little rectangle of pearl onions and two rows of carrots. I planted a stash of beets in one of the corners to donate. I transplanted twenty pea plants along the border of my garden and I dropped four newly sprouted garlic cloves, that I scored as part of the bribe, next to the spinach. Before I left, I built a little lattice of yarn for the peas to climb and I watered the freshly planted seeds.
Crouched down, over my uneven patch of dirt, with music in my ears and mud under my nails, I breathed it all in before heading back to the shack to return my vest.
Walking back to my unit, as the sun was falling towards the horizon, I felt like I was floating. I mean, I literally felt like I was drifting away. My feet were coasting over the asphalt, and my head was up in the clouds. It took me a minute to realize what had rendered me immune to the effects of gravity: It was the first time in five years that I felt Freedom. I mean real Freedom.
In the middle of the prison, in my little patch of dirt, with no C.O.s hovering over my shoulder, or telling me what to do, without the sound of cell doors slamming shut and whipping open, without the cacophony of overcompensating voices, disgruntled and aggressive men, yelling at everything and nothing at all.
In this calm amongst the chaos.
I felt it.
Surrounded by garden plots, without a fence, a steel bar, or a single spiral of razor wire in sight, for the briefest of moments.
I felt it.
Just listening to music and playing in the dirt, after five years of confinement, I managed to touch the tail of Freedom. It had been so long, that I hardly recognized the feeling. A feeling so foreign and elusive it felt like a distant dream. A type of deja-vu.
But I felt it.
So every time I head back out, to a garden that grows taller and more colorful with each passing day, I'm searching for that feeling. In my little patch of dirt, where I use alchemy to bring sunlight and water to life, I'm chasing down deja-vu, I'm looking to float away, and I'm grasping at the tail of Freedom. Just listening to music and playing in the dirt.
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OK, this isn't part of the piece, I just wanted to tell you what I've got growing in my plot now. It isn't enough for me to annoy my friends in here, with my gardening nerd-outs, I will now bore you all. Feel free to ignore this, unless you're interested in gardening, or bored out of you mind, or you get off on wasting your own time.
This is what I've got:
3x cherry tomatoes plants (about a foot tall)
2x beef steak tomatoes plants (1+ft tall) looking good and hearty! (What have I become?)
3x sugar plum tomatoes. They're babies, I just transplanted them a few days ago.
10x cucumbers. Four of them are getting close to flowering. The rest I just planted. I wanted to wait so I could plan on where to run the vines through.
8x banana pepper plants (small)
8x Bell pepper plants (small)
2x rows of spinach. I already grew and ate 2 rows, I pulled em out once they started flowering and replanted.
1x row of cilantro (had to pull strings to get these. I really wanted fresh cilantro)
1x row of mint.
50x white onions (I was over watering them for awhile)
40x red onions
3x red cabbage (large dinner plate size. gonna make stuffed cabbage!)
3x green cabbage (same)
15x Peas. They're only about a foot tall (everyone else's is 2-3 times the size.) I have 'Pea-size' envy?! but mine are already flowering and I've been eating pods)
2x rows of carrots (the stalks are about six inches)
4x Head lettuce (Can't wait to make lettuce wraps.)
3x garlic plants. (one didn't survive the transplant and the other three aren't really doing much. I think I was watering them too much originally. Most people's (those who have them) garlic are doing the same. I was hoping that they would do better, I was looking forward to fresh garlic.
5x eggplants
1x squash
A bunch of beets.
This will be the first time in five years that I'll be able to eat fresh vegetables. The lack of healthy food in here is one of the worst aspects of prison life. Being restricted to fifty dollars a month makes it impossible to buy healthy food on the commissary. I can't wait to be able to eat fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, and cheese when I get out....oh god I miss real cheese!