It has been a long time since we have updated this site and lots of exciting new things have happened. For one, we are getting ready to plant again this season with a possible purchase of the gardens by Madison Community Co-operatives on the horizon! It is still not certain, but we are hoping for the best as MCC continues to negotiate with the Alexander Company.
If you would like to sign up for a plot at Drumlin Community Garden for the 2010 season, contact Paula at 608 217 0541 or by email at: pjbrotski@uwalumni.com
To learn more about this historic struggle for the land, come one, come all to the Sprouting Artists at Drumlin Gardens traveling art show. Art by 14 different area artists on the walls of the Froth House for the month of March. 11 North Allen Street, right next to West High School.
On March 11th from 5-9 PM gather at the Froth House to meet and greet with the artists and hear testimonials from gardeners about their experiences at Drumlin. Eat salsa grown and prepared by the Drumlin Producers Co-op, enjoy organic, cruelty-free cheese and crackers provided by Family Farm Defenders and hear the music of Son Mudanza http://www.myspace.com/sonmudanza and Thistle http://www.myspace.com/thistlespace There will be video shown by Luciano of Blazen Video Productions, documenting our movements to save the gardens.
Spring is coming! Time to awaken the gardens again and get ready to plant!
I am a farmer. While I find that this has come to mean many other things to other people – that I have become also a trainer and teacher, and to some a sort of food philosopher – I do like nothing better than to get my hands into good rich soil and sow the seeds of hope.
So, spring always enlivens me and gives me the energy to make haste, to feel confidence, to take full advantage of another all-too-short Wisconsin summer.
This spring, however, much more so than in past springs, I feel my hope and confidence mixed with a sense of greater urgency. This spring, I know that my work will be all the more important, for the simple but profound reason that more people are hungry.
“Our lives are dependent on the sacrifice of the Campesinos”- Cesar Chavez
On April 17, 1996 1,500 members of Brazil’s MST, the Landless Peasants Movement, having been evicted from their farms two years earlier, marched to the state capitol in Para to demand a return of their land so they could again feed their families. Instead of meeting with government officials they were surrounded by police, who, using machine guns, killed 19 and seriously wounded 69.
Farmers, peasants, the indigenous and the landless are entitled to land only until the government or the corporate interests find a better use for it.
La Via Campesina, the international movement of the small farmer celebrates April 17 as the International day of Peasant’s Struggles. The struggle against the evictions, oppression and marginalization of the farmer. The commemoration of the struggles of Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers and the indigenous peoples of the world.
Those who farm in the US distance themselves from the term peasant, thinking it connotes a tenant, sharecropper, a small farmer or mere farm worker. I am a small farmer, a peasant and proud of it. Remember, roughly half of the worlds population are farmers who work the land and tend livestock. While I am a minority in the US, worldwide, I am part of the majority. More »
The gardeners at the Drumlin Community Garden in Fitchburg can tell you about urban sprawl — they work next to it.
Take a drive. Begin in downtown Madison where businesses are bustling and pedestrians walk the streets, and head toward the edge of town. The change is imperceptible, but once you are in sprawl territory, you know it. The streets and buildings are arranged haphazardly, leading to vacant strip malls, parking lots, and monotonous subdivisions. It is the part that grows, without a plan, out of control. In Wisconsin, we have lost nearly 36 percent of farmland to development since 1950. Sprawl contributes to increased pollution, fragmented communities, and decreased land and water quality. Depressing is how I describe it.
To have survived and found a spark of life in this modern wasteland makes Drumlin Community Garden a bit magical. These 5 acres in northeast Fitchburg sit between two landscapes: the green swaths of farmland to the south, and the gray of poorly planned development everywhere else. Seen from a bird’s-eye view, Drumlin Community Garden is a last stronghold against the march of urban sprawl.
Sadly, these may be the last days for the garden if development presses on as planned. The question is whether the developer, the Alexander Co., will show social responsibility in the Southdale neighborhood. More »
Apprised that his rival in the race for Fitchburg mayor has linked him to domestic terrorists, Jay Allen has an interesting reaction: He laughs and laughs.
“He wrote that?” says Allen, a 14-year veteran of the Fitchburg Common Council, between guffaws. “Oh my God! That is just crazy. Just absolutely insane.”
Allen is referring to a March 9 fundraising letter (PDF) sent out by former Fitchburg Mayor Mark Vivian and obtained by Isthmus. The two men are vying for the open position of Fitchburg mayor in the April 7 election. Vivian, who was Fitchburg’s mayor from 1999 to 2003, tied for second place in the primary, and won a coin toss – seriously, that’s how it’s done – for the right to oppose Allen, the top vote-getter.
In his letter, before asking for contributions to beat back Ald. Allen’s nefarious designs, Vivian asserts:
“My opponent, Jay Allen, has introduced legislative action to use the City’s police powers to condemn land owned by the Novation Campus, and threaten 2.5 million dollars of your tax money to interfere in what should be a private matter between current tenants living illegally on Novation property and its owners. The illegal tenants have known ties to an organization identified on the U.S. Federal Government list of domestic terrorist groups.”
Grab the kids and run for cover! Can car bombings in McKee Park be far behind? Will deadly biological agents be added to the produce at the Agora Pavilion farmers market? Will Berbee and Promega become havens for sleeper cells?
WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of the South Lawn on Friday to plant a vegetable garden, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets — the president does not like them — but arugula will make the cut.
While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at a time when obesity and diabetes have become a national concern.
“My hope,” the first lady said in an interview in her East Wing office, “is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.”
Here’s a great article about what’s possible when business leaders and government listen to the demands of the people. Hungry children? Out of work farmers? Struggling families? These questions are not impossible to answer, and if the politicians can’t figure it out, maybe it’s time to listen to the people who know: those affected by the crisis.
The questions we’re asking here are about whose interests are served by government spending and civic effort. Read on for a perspective from a city in Brazil that found a way to support local farmers and get food to people who need it.
A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.
by Frances Moore Lappé
“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.” CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL
In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States-one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps-these questions take on new urgency.
To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help-not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market-you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.
Rebecca Smithers, consumer affairs correspondent
The Guardian, Thursday 19 February 2009
In the boom times of the 1980s, councils sold off allotments in their tens of thousands as it seemed no one in the Britain of conspicuous consumption could be persuaded to grow a single leek of their own. But as recession bites, the growing enthusiasm for homegrown veg has seen more than 100,000 people join waiting lists for a patch of land as demand hits an all-time high.
Today, following the initiative of chef and “real food” campaigner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the National Trust is throwing its weight behind a campaign to share unused land, creating up to 1,000 new plots for use as allotments or community gardens.
The National Trust is seeking to persuade every household, office and company to grow its own vegetables in a campaign that will create 1,000 allotments on its own land.
Gordon Brown is being urged to plant a vegetable patch at 10 Downing Street, and down the road the trust is to practise what it preaches by letting staff dig up the garden of its Westminster premises.
The trust has identified 40 sites that it hopes can be turned into allotments within three years, or where the former kitchen gardens of country houses can be restored and used to teach gardening skills.
Officials of the Alexander Co. said Monday they are willing to sell a controversial community gardens parcel near Rimrock Road to the city of Fitchburg.
The company, which is developing the 70-acre Novation Campus business park, also is willing to sign a lease with the Community Action Coalition to make the land available for community gardens this year and possibly in 2010.
“We want to provide a temporary solution,” said company president Joe Alexander. “The onus to provide a permanent location has to be on the neighborhood.”
From the Nine Springs E-Way, Drumlin can be seen on the right of the photo. The Big Pink sits in the trees, and the remaining woodland on the north edge of the Farm stands in contrast to the cleared area. To the left rise the crane and new construction of the Novation Campus. The Drumlin fields are out of view behind the trees.
The Glacial Drumlin garden deserves to be protected from becoming an industrial park
By: Tom Hart /The Daily Cardinal - February 10, 2009
The red-orange sun was setting over the frozen marshes of beige and grey as I came around the pink stucco house perched on top of a hill in suburban Fitchburg. I understood why the Swedish immigrant who built the Arts and Crafts style home over 100 years ago had situated the front porch facing in that direction. The view was awe-inducing for a brief moment, but then it hit me: this could all be gone within a matter of months.
A Swedish master carpenter by trade, Albert Anderberg moved to Madison at the turn of the 20th century to help reconstruct the fire-ravaged Madison Capitol building. He picked out the perfect plot of land to build his house upon. The rich soil above the Fitchburg marshes provided a perfect space for a garden and the commute to the Capitol building was brief.
Check out the new photos up in the gallery over in Our Garden
It hasn’t been updated in forever, but we’re putting a bunch of pictures in the gallery, so check back often for more inspiration to get yer garden on this year…
Paula Brotski, a single mother and full-time UW-Madison student, remembers times when she didn’t have enough money to buy a carton of milk. But last summer, she and her son, Aden, always had fresh vegetables.
Their community garden plot at Drumlin Garden in Fitchburg yielded so much fresh produce that Aden, 7, earned his allowance going door to door selling basil to neighbors. And Brotski, 37, had enough tomatoes and other homegrown vegetables to last them through the winter.
But now the garden, like many farms before it, is being threatened by development.
Department of Agriculture video from the 1940’s with plenty of tips on how to create the model Victory Garden. Views expressed in this video are NOT necessarily in line with sustainable agriculture. But go ahead and spray your crops if y’all want to…just not up here in our swamp!
Wajid Jenkins spent much of the summer of 2002 on his knees, carrying his infant daughter on his back, digging his fingers into the warm, black soil at Drumlin farm.
Jenkins had come to the farm as an agricultural intern, hoping to learn organic farming methods. He was immediately drawn by the beauty of Drumlin — a tiny, five-acre rural oasis sandwiched between Rimrock Road and Highway 14 in the city of Fitchburg.
“I was working in the fields overlooking the Nine Springs marsh,” recalls Jenkins. “I was learning to plant onions for the first time and watching the geese flying overhead.”
At the time, Drumlin was operated as a CSA (community supported agriculture), where the public could buy shares of produce from the farm. Jenkins would hitch a trailer to his bike and cycle all over town, delivering boxes of vegetables.
While the weather makes us long for warmer climes, it seemed like a great time to remind folks what lies under the frozen tundra. Heartfelt thanks to kite photographer Craig Wilson for his gorgeous portraits of this special place.
Overlooking Drumlin Farm and Garden with the Nine Springs Marsh E-Way in the background.
At the December 2 meeting of the Fitchburg Plan Commission, gardeners, neighbors, friends, families, a theater troupe and non-profit organizations gave moving testimony to the value of Drumlin Community Gardens. Three days later, the Alexander Company sent residents of Drumlin notices terminating their housing leases. This stands in stark contrast to the image they created at the Plan Commission meeting of being responsible, open to working with the community, and willing to preserve the gardens for at least one more season.
Fitchburg Historical Society Estelle Anderberg, third from left, who painted many of the murals in the house, with other unidentified family members. She died in 2002 at the age of 93.
The Fitchburg Historical Society board of directors voted on Jan. 4, to ask the Alexander Co. not to tear down a historic home in the path of commercial development at 2849 Oregon Road, and to ask the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to consider it for landmark status.
The pink stucco home doesn’t look like much from the outside. But on the inside, there’s distinctive oak woodwork crafted by builder Albert Anderberg around the turn of the 20th century, the foundation is rock solid and the structure of the house is strong and true, according to Historical Society board members who toured the home.
In addition, there are stained and leaded glass windows, beamed ceilings and murals and graphics that were painted by Anderberg’s daughter, Estelle.
“It’s a hidden treasure,” said board member Winnie Lacy.
This is a video put together for a presentation in front of the City of Fitchburg Plan Commission. Gave a short presentation and had lots of public comment. The video has lovely scenes of the great season of 2008…thanks to everyone who contributed to the effort!
by Thistle, resident gardener and Friend of Drumlin
On November 4th, when most people were watching TV for election day coverage, over 70 people went to the Fitchburg Plan Commission to say with a unified voice that Drumlin should be preserved and language in the Southdale Neighborhood Plan should reflect that desire. The Plan Commission was overwhelmed by the turn-out and tabled passage of the plan for thirty days. One member introduced amendments to the plan that would at least mention the existence of the Farm.
We went home from that mobilization, more unified and energized and some of us started planning for when the thirty days were up. On December 2nd, the Plan Commission met again at Fitchburg City Hall and this time, we had 100 people there and a theater piece facilitated by MadTown Liberty Players, a local popular theater troupe. It went over really well, despite many fears to the contrary expressed before the theater piece was performed. If you are persistent, stay on course and allow fears to be aired and taken as constructive criticism, people can come up with beautiful and delightful things using our collective creativity.
Gardens build community, encourage self-reliance, lower food costs, beautify the neighborhood, and give us a place for gathering, education, exercise, and family fun. If you love healthy, affordable, local food, come lend your voice and help us say: WE CAN'T AFFORD TO LOSE THIS GARDEN
