Lifetime farmer Robert Walker, who was turned down by Surf City Council in his quest for land to begin a small farm for his fellow Islanders, has been “working his butt off” the past couple weeks at the Stafford Community Garden at Manahawkin Lake. Volunteers who have been tending to the mainland garden, which was cultivated last June with the hope of growing into a flourishing town epicenter, recently invited Walker to lend a skilled hand.
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| Photo by Jack Reynolds The Stafford Community Garden is maintained by local volunteers. |
“He’s going to bring to the community garden what we’re really lacking, which is somebody who really knows farming,” said Mark Reynolds of Reynolds Landscaping, who created the garden with help from the Stafford Township Recreation Department and other community members. “We’re all willing to build a garden. We’re all willing to be involved. I have my expertise, and we’re looking for people for their expertise. So that’s what he’s bringing to the table, and he has a vast knowledge.”
Walker, who has been in the farming industry since 1946, has been working in the garden practically every day by himself, from morning to night in rain or shine.
“Farmers don’t stop just because it rains. You got a job to do, you get out there and you do it regardless of what the weather is. If you don’t, you run out of time,” Walker said.
The garden has an established footprint, which is being expanded to include a bunch of linear, low to the ground, raised beds for all different types of crops, Reynolds said. Walker’s main focus is on correcting some of the issues, including altering the soils to make them more conducive to vegetable gardening.
“Most of the soil in a lot of the planters, as far as I was concerned, was wrong,” Walker stated. “You can’t feed plants stones and sand. It needs the silt, which is the fluffy powder from the soil that plants live on.”
To carry out the work, Reynolds is providing Walker with all the necessary materials and equipment. Reynolds recently delivered a truckload of soil that had been pushed up from Jablonski’s Farm, the biggest farm formerly on Beachview Avenue in Manahawkin from the 1920s through the late ’70s.
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| Photo by Rebecca Gee The garden produced a plethora of vegetables in its first year. |
“Not only is it a better soil, but it also has some connection to gardening and farming,” Reynolds said. “The soil I initially bought was more geared toward what I do for a living and not so much for a farm.”
Mushroom soil as well as pig manure, which Walker said is the most valuable manure on the farm because it is the only type that has phosphorus, which plants need to grow, should be arriving soon. Another volunteer will be raising worms, which Walker said make “super, super fertilizer.”
“Everyone's been so helpful, trying to make things as easy as they could for me,” Walker stated. “It’s great because I have a lot of support working up there, and they pretty much give me a lot of freedom to use my own imagination and do what has to be done. I’m really excited with it.
“They put a lot of work into everything they were doing, and I’m trying to get a lot of things straightened out,” he added. “They had a lot of minor mistakes that are going to be easy to correct, and hopefully I can get everybody on the right foot and get them started.”
Walker is working to get many of the “hard, difficult things out of the way,” before two garden cleanup days on March 30 and April 3 at 1 p.m. He hopes volunteers will be able to retie the fruit trees and even do some planting then. White potatoes, which prefer cooler weather and take about five to six months to produce, should have been planted on St. Patrick's Day, but the garden was not yet ready, he said.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun trying to educate people in the dos and don’ts of gardening,” Walker stated. “I’ll try to walk along as softly as I can with everybody and try to keep everybody as happy as I can and try to set them on the right track to understand why it is you have to do certain things.”
Ideally, Walker said, everything should be planted by the movement of the moon. Vegetables that bear their fruit below ground have to be planted on the downward of the moon, and vegetables that bear their fruit above ground need to be planted on the upcoming of the moon, he explained.
“It’s unbelievable what the difference a day or two makes, when the moon changes from full moon to half-moon,” Walker stated. “When I was young, I didn’t believe in it. Unless you can see something like that, it sounds like folklore. There are things that you only learn by being with experienced farmers and being on the farm.”
The Island resident is also concentrating on creating more space in the garden. He removed four pine trees to make room for a shed that was set on cinder blocks when it was donated in the fall. He hopes to add decks and a pavilion-type canopy to it so volunteers can take a break from the sun.
The overall mission of the garden is to raise awareness about the many people in the local area who are struggling for food. It is being led by the Hunger Foundation of Southern Ocean County, formerly known as the Southern Ocean County Community Foundation, which raises money for the area’s food banks.
“We built this garden so it’s visually appealing. You look at it, and you want to be involved,” said Reynolds. “Then when you get there, we start to educate you about the plight of the hungry within our community. The two things coincide with one another, teaching people about healthy eating and also that there are people in the community that don’t have enough to eat.”
While Reynolds believes a portion of the produce will be given to the food banks, he said perishable food is not as valuable as providing funds to purchase canned goods and other packaged groceries.
“We’re not trying to raise food in the garden to feed everybody in the community because it’s too small of a garden, but if we can raise awareness, then we can raise monies and feed people that way,” he said. “We don’t want to cancel the concept of giving food to the food banks because people just think that’s a great idea, but the true understanding of a garden and how much food you can produce out of it doesn’t always work for a food bank because they’re perishable products that you’re growing. But I can imagine that some of this food will make it to a food bank.”
Volunteers plan to have events and fundraisers at the garden. Walker hopes to use it as a training center to teach people how to can food and preserve spices and herbs.
“A lot of it is not that complicated,” Walker said. “It’s surprising how many people don’t know what a turnip or a beet is, or even how to use them. There’s a couple generations now that are living from McDonald’s to Burger King to Wendy’s to Wawa, and they don’t know that much about vegetables.
“We hope that in training people, they’ll go home with the knowledge and produce a garden for themselves,” he added. “It will help people to be healthier. We have more health problems in the United States than the rest of the world, and that’s a shame.”
Walker hopes the community garden will also become a place for seniors to hang out, which he believes the area really needs.
“Unfortunately the Island doesn’t do a lot for seniors, and many of the other coastal towns really don’t have a whole lot either,” he said. “You’ve got to have something for all types of people. The person that wants to garden is not the kind of a person who wants to hang out on a golf course.”
Walker has been invited to meet with Ship Bottom Council to discuss his ideas for an Island farm. If they come to an agreement, he plans to work in both gardens. If they don’t, he said he will keep himself busy at the Stafford garden.
For more information or to get involved in the mainland garden, visit the Hunger Foundation’s Facebook page at facebook.com/SouthernOCCommunityFoundation.
The group is also looking for garden donations since most of the supplies are being provided by Reynolds.
— Kelley Anne Essinger
This article was published in The SandPaper.
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