The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
Shortly after I began attending New Beginnings Moravian Church in January 2019, I sat down with the interim pastor to discuss where I fit in with the ministry. As we discussed my hobbies and interests, he got excited when I mentioned gardening. The church had been trying to establish a community garden without much success, and he thought I might be able to help out with that.
As I became more involved with the congregation, I learned more about the garden situation and why success had been elusive. The church owned a 13-acre tract of land on Hwy. 73 just outside of town, off Black Farms Road. Ultimately, they hoped to build a new church building there, but that project was at least a decade in the future.
After visiting the site and speaking with members who had been involved with the previous gardening attempts, I determined that their efforts were hampered by three significant challenges.
1) Dirt from the site was used in the construction of the highway, so much of the topsoil had been removed, leaving a hard clay base that was unsuited for traditional row gardening.
2) There was no on-site water source, so water had to be brought to the garden on an almost daily basis during the summer.
3) The site was far enough outside town to make frequent visits for watering, weeding and fertilizing impractical.
Fortunately, my background as a Square Foot Gardening instructor offered a solution to all three of these problems. Not to get overly woo-woo, but it was almost as if my background and experience had brought me to that specific church at that particular time.
Square Foot Gardening is a growing method developed by Mel Bartholomew that utilizes raised beds, a grid system and a special soil formulation to produce yields comparable to those of a traditional row garden while using only 20 percent of the space, and with no digging or tilling, no fertilizer, minimal weeding and less water.
After consulting with the church elders and our new pastor over the summer, I brought a proposal for a garden ministry to the board in October. The plan called for a phased garden project based on Square Foot Gardening methods. Phase one, which would begin in 2020, would be a 30-foot by 30-foot fenced garden with eight 4X8-foot raised beds, a compost-in-place area and small storage shed. The budget would be $4,000, all of which would be raised from donations.
Phase two would be rolled out in 2021 or 2022 and would effectively double the size of the garden to 30-feet by 60-feet and 16 raised beds.
Phase three was tentatively planned for 2025 and would double the size again, to 3,600 square feet or almost a tenth of an acre.
All of the produce grown in the first two phases would be donated to the local “soup kitchen,” while the third phase also proposed a presence at a local farmers’ market both as a way of promoting the church and as a way to raise a small amount of money for ongoing garden maintenance and supplies.
It is fair to say that the design for the garden was a little more elaborate than absolutely necessary. The Moravian Church got its foothold in the Carolinas at the town of Salem, which is now part of Winston-Salem. Old Salem is maintained as a living museum, and we wanted our garden to reflect the character of the Old Salem gardens to as great an extent as possible. I made a scouting trip there, where I took pictures and made notes on Colonial gardening design and methods. As it turns out, Colonial gardens used a technique not all that different from Mel Bartholomew’s original “in-ground” Square Foot method. Hence, it was easy to justify the modern Square Foot system we would be using. Other design elements I brought back with me were white picket fencing, the use of barrels for water storage and a sketch for a sturdy, functional shed.
The church board approved the proposal, and we broke ground at the Black Farms Road site on Jan. 26, 2020. As tends to happen with best-laid plans, things immediately took a turn for the worse. We were plagued by constant rain during the first three weeks of work. The red clay soil became saturated to the point where post holes filled with muck as quickly as we could dig them. It was a gooey, sloppy mess, but we persevered, and the fence was completed and painted by the end of February.
Construction of the raised beds was well under way, and we had planned March 21 as “dirt day,” a celebration of the start of spring and an opportunity for the congregation to help us mix the dirt and fill the raised beds, when COVID-19 put an end to all church gatherings. In response, we arranged for individual families to mix, fill and grid the beds on a schedule that ensured social distancing. We are taking a similar approach to “sowing day” for our warm season crops on April 25.
The coronavirus crisis has undoubtedly added a new level of difficulty to our already challenging gardening situation. We are having to make major changes to the ways we initially panned to handle watering, maintenance and harvesting based on the current stay-at-home and social distancing restrictions, and have postponed the building of the shed until later in the season.
Our original plan was to have a congregational celebration and cookout at the garden in mid-July, and we are still hoping to do that, but it is somewhat in doubt at this point. For more information, pictures and updates, visit the New Beginnings Moravian Garden page on Facebook.