Ken and Ian Whitter of Boca Raton work on their irrigation.
A scarecrow keeps watch over one patch of tomatoes,
while, below: a plastic flamingo and yellow marigolds provide a little bit of color.
INSET BELOW: Banana peppers near harvest size.
Photos by Jerry Lower/ The Coastal Star
By Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley
On this Sunday morning, Jessica Holtzman walks through the Boca Raton Community Garden to check her 4-foot-square raised bed. Here she’s planted carrots, radishes, fennel, mustard, beans and parsley. She is waiting for the seeds to sprout from the dark earth.
“I didn’t realize what food looked like when it grew on plants. This is so cool to watch my things take off,” says Holtzman, 30, who lives in a nearby townhouse with only a small yard.
Now in its fourth growing season, this is the largest community garden in South Florida. It is situated on an acre of land contributed by the city. Today the Boca Raton Junior League collaborates with the city to help run it. There are almost 100 raised beds, built with the help of people at Home Depot and The Boca Raton Elk’s Lodge.
Alan Kirschner, 53, has a meeting in a few minutes but he stops by to be sure his neat rows of heirloom tomatoes are thriving in their raised 12-by-4-foot bed.
“I’ve always wanted a garden but never had the land to do it,” says Kirschner who has been gardening here for three years.
You enter the organic garden on a palm-lined brick path. There isn’t too much shade because the sun is required for growing the crops. Although some people tend their plots year-round, most plant after mid-October and harvest by May to avoid the summer heat.
If you want to see what’s growing, mulch paths wind their way between the planting beds. The mulch and four star fruit trees were donated by Zimmerman Tree Service of Lake Worth, which is Orli Zimmerman’s family business. She’s a league member who co-chairs the garden committee.
All the star fruit, like much of the harvest, is contributed to Boca Helping Hands, where it feeds the hungry. In fact, the league requests that people contribute 10 percent of their crops to the charity.
Toward the rear of the garden you’ll discover the newly planted wildlife walk. Native plants such as spiderwort with its rich blue blooms, passion vine, purple beach verbena and yellow Chapman’s cassia attract beneficial bugs and pollinators such as bees. These in turn help the food crops and flowers to reproduce and grow.
This is the third growing season for Holtzman, who has marked where she planted her seeds with white plastic spoons stuck in the fertile dirt. She’s written the name of each crop on a spoon handle.
Kirschner’s specialty is heirloom tomato varieties. Although you can’t tell much difference in the plants before they bear fruit, this year he’s trying his luck with Black Krim, a brownish red variety from the Crimean Peninsula; Black Prince, a pear-shaped fruit from Siberia; and Cherokee Purple, a purple red native American. All should do well in our warm climate.
His girlfriend has a more free-form garden in a neighboring plot. Her red sails lettuce grows under a burlap cover that protects it from the late summer sun. She grows garlic from cloves that sprouted in her refrigerator and mint returns for an encore each year.
In her bed, garden co-chair Laura Zaki intends to plant what she calls a salsa mix: That’s tomatoes, onions and peppers.
“I garden at home, but it’s fun to be here in touch with others who share my passion. And it’s fun to see the community come together among the plants,” she says.
Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley is a certified master gardener who can be reached at debhartz@att.net when she’s not in her garden.
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