How one Colorado gardener built a pandemic-proof garden
More below: Tips for starting your own community garden
CRESTONE — The massive, high-altitude alpine desert of the San Luis Valley covers roughly 8,000 square miles starting at Poncha Pass, where the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges converge, and spread south across the Colorado-New Mexico border. It’s a sweeping hydrologic basin that feels a little like a lyric in Gregory Alan Isakov’s song “San Luis”: “weightless, no gravity.”
But as far as food deserts in Colorado go, it’s one of the worst, containing Alamosa, Costilla, Saguache, Mineral and Rio Grande counties.
Blame vast distances to food. The USDA Economic Research Service defines food deserts as low-income areas located more than 10 miles from a large supermarket. In sprawling rural counties, stores can be 20 or more miles away. Small population bases have a hard time attracting grocery stores, which are drawn to higher density or affluent areas, where they can generate more profit.
But in Crestone, a tiny town in Saguache County, the story flips a little. Crestone has a population of around 130 people, and the greater Crestone area, including the unincorporated Baca Grande development, has another 1,000 to 1,500.
About 44% of folks in Crestone live in poverty according to U.S. census data, though median income is difficult to quantify due to the town’s small population.
But boutique shops and two food markets line the streets. Local artists, alternative homebuilders, massage therapists and spiritual leaders make Crestone home. Many are drawn to the town for religious reasons.
At least 25 spiritual centers are based in Crestone including churches and ashrams focused on everything from Buddhism to Hinduism to Catholicism. They draw people interested in meditation, consciousness and interfaith practice to the creosote-scented town in the shadows of Kit Carson Peak, Crestone Peak and Crestone Needle — all towering 14,000-foot mountains.
Within this “vortex” in the San Luis Valley, as Crestone residents like to call it, Ginny Ducale has found a way to help solve food insecurity in her little corner of Saguache County.
Meet Crestone’s master gardener
Ducale is a sinewy, sun-kissed 81-year-old who wears a knife with a 4.5-inch steel blade on her belt. Her energy is Peter Pan if Pan was stronger, more weathered and an astrology-loving master gardener.
Before coming to Crestone, she spent years working at Arcosanti, an experimental town in the high desert of northern Arizona exploring “upright urban living,” which Italian architect Paolo Soleri conceived as an antidote to horizontal urban sprawl.
At Arcosanti, Ducale gave tours of Soleri’s living experiments in architecture, ecology and community, cooked, ran a backhoe and built a giant herb garden before moving to Eugene, Oregon, where she cultivated more gardens that caught the interest of people living in nearby homeless shelters who wanted to help.
“The women in the shelter built big herb gardens,” she said. “Then men started, and the women started painting rocks for the paths between them. Then they grew another vegetable garden with all kinds of vegetables and a big chicken coop. The whole town in Eugene supported them.”
In 2011, at a community art walk in Eugene, Ducale’s boyfriend met a woman selling cremation urns. Excitedly, he told her he his one wish in death was to be cremated under the stars. She said he should go to Crestone, the only place in the U.S. that allows legal, public open air burials.
“He jumped in his car and came out here, and he loved it,” Ducale said. Then he invited her out. She moved there permanently in 2012 and she loves it, in part because of “the closeness that people can have with each other, and the fact that it’s a community.”
“We have community events, concerts, game nights, open mic nights, karaoke nights and three or four restaurants. We can hang out in the park together. We all know each other. And we sort of like each other,” she said. “I think there’s an energy here because of the fact that it’s considered a spiritual center.”
All the gardening Ducale had done before she moved to Crestone had burned her out. But she soon jumped back in.
Gardening in a pandemic
All was well until 2020.
That April, after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the communities of Crestone and Baca Grande held a three-day conference trying to figure out how they’d survive if society collapsed. They broke into groups to tackle things like food and energy security, transportation, community and rebuilding the government, and some of the other groups ended up dissolving, the food group stuck.
Her group got to work transforming the land next to the Episcopal church into a food-growing machine with dozens of different plants crammed in the small space together.
It took around two years to get the soil to the quality she wanted. By planting in the soil they did have, adding minerals like phosphorus and nitrogen and folding in compost, she and a handful of community volunteers turned a 50-foot-by-75-foot plot of land into a garden that now feeds dozens of people a variety of medicinal herbs, hearty root vegetables, leafy greens and cruciferous crunchies once a week from June through October.
People love to peer through the garden gate she put up to deter wildlife that wanders in for a snack, like a deer she chased out “that was nibbling while he was running,” she said.
“They’ll eat anything in here, whether it’s potatoes or something that’s toxic. We have quite a few hungry deer, and we feed them. I have a box that’s got fruit and vegetables in it for the bear and the deer.”
“This is catnip,” she said, waving a pale green plant around on a steamy July day as velvety black-and-blue butterflies floated above the garden. “It’s a calming plant our mother used on us when we were teething as babies.”
“This is chamomile,” she said, sweeping a tanned arm above a small sea of gently swaying yellow-and-white flowers.
“The only thing I don’t grow is okra.”
On Saturdays, volunteers come to help harvest kale and lettuce, sunchokes, cherries and chard, four varieties of summer squash, two of spinach, arugula, dill that was 5-feet tall in July, several other herbs and elderberry bushes that produced fruit for the first time this year.
While they’re working the beds, they’re picking and plucking, and everybody can take what they want from that day’s harvest. “Sometimes there’s not a lot of carrots and everybody only takes one or two,” Ducale said. “But then other times there’s so much abundance that they leave it there and I have to take it home and eat it.” And every Saturday she serves a giant community lunch from that day’s harvest.
On Thursdays, Ducale loads several bins with whatever is ripe and drives it to the local food pantry, where the hungry can eat Earth’s bounty. They don’t get everything: “They don’t get carrots because there’s just so many carrots for my volunteers,” she said. “They probably won’t get tomatoes, but they get the summer squash and we give them all of our zucchinis. And they get a lot of kale, chard, collards and arugula.”
The pantry also carries canned goods, dried foods, boxed foods and produce from other places.
And many in the community of Crestone think of Ducale as “this big hero,” she said, because “I promise something for the community, and it’s their community garden.”
How to build your own community garden
Here are some of Ducale’s tips for starting your own community garden.
- Find a space big enough to support the amount of food you need. Purchase seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.
- Have a good water supply, either well or town water. Use hoses and spray devices for water distribution. Creeks and rivers aren’t enough.
- Use nitrogen-rich soil to feed the roots of plants.
- It has been said that one needs to make a $20 dollar hole for a $10 plant. So having a compost pile will be important to build the soil needed in the years to come. Build more than one.
- If there is grass in your field, a layering technique can help rid the area of weeds and grasses. Start with a thick layer of cardboard and then layer with straw, compost, manure, greens, etc.
- Rich, composted soil a foot deep is enough to feed the roots of a growing plant, but deeper is better. Sand will drain too fast, and clay will need a mix of compost, leaf mulch or mushroom compost to hold the water.
- Greenhouses are good for growing seedlings that take longer to reach maturity – start seeds in February. Many plants can be seeded in the ground in early April. Get the growing calendar for your area.
- Test soil to be sure it’s rich in all the nutrients needed by each different food crop.
- Use a drip system to water the garden. Set timers to start drips early each morning. Sometimes in very dry times we water early in the morning and early in the evening for about a half hour.
- In the fall after harvest, cut plants down right in the bed and cover with compost in preparation for tilling it in the following spring. Building rich soil is important.
- Consider covering any remaining plants with a foot of straw and leaves to keep them alive through the winter. Collecting seeds might be an option.
