Garden’s Yield Is a Bounty Beyond Food
Here in the late spring, Hank Panian’s garden has been reduced to a patch of dark promise. The winter crops are in and the plants uprooted, and now the rows sit largely empty, the faint mustiness of steer manure dissipating in the afternoon breeze.
From this will grow joy, and sustenance.
In each of the last 12 years, Panian and a handful of fellow volunteers have quietly raised as much as two tons of organic food on the grounds of Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. And they have given nearly all of it away to the 170 mostly low-income families of the adjoining Harry & Grace Steele Children’s Center, largess that has helped nourish more children than Panian can count.
“They use the vegetables I grow for snacks, and the surplus goes to the parents,” said Panian, 72, a retired Orange Coast history professor. “I put the stuff out in the morning, and by midafternoon, practically everything is gone. Many of them are single parents who are really trying to make ends meet, and this is one way of helping them to do that.”
The work of Panian and his colleagues--Orange Coast faculty members Jay and Betil Yett and Children’s Center employee Jan Jobse--lacks the drama of some other acts of charity. Panian and his fold of farmers don’t troll mean streets doling out blankets to the homeless or syringes to the addicted. And they don’t make romantic runs to Third World countries to build schools and waterworks.
They simply set aside a little time each day to tend to a garden, and to nourish the young.
“He’s a serious gardener; he doesn’t mess around,” said Lucy Groetsch, child care manager for the children’s center. “His goal is to grow as much food as he can possibly produce.”
The garden is rectangular, about 100 feet long and a little less than that wide. Enclosed by a 6-foot-high wooden fence, the space is divided into a series of rich plots. Panian tends one, the Yetts tend another, and Jobse oversees the rest, which are farmed largely by the children themselves.
These are learning plots, where the children help prepare the ground and nurture the plants. There are tomatoes and herbs, green onions and carrots, strawberries and raspberries. The work buttresses other lessons taught in the center itself on the cycles of nature and where those little carrots in plastic bags at the grocery store actually come from.
“At first the children would be running around stepping on the plants,” Groetsch said. “Now they know, and they teach the new kids coming in. That’s all a part of it, learning respect for the earth. . . . They know where vegetables come from now, and they know these vegetables come from their own garden.”
The real gardening, though, is done in the adjoining plots. Southern California is a gardener’s paradise--thanks to irrigation--and the seasons are marked less by climate than by crop cycle. Panian’s winter take is already in, counted and, for the most part, eaten. Beets and turnips, cabbage and broccoli, all organically raised. And cauliflower.
“It was the best cauliflower I ever raised,” Panian said, standing in the afternoon sun, his face shaded by a farmer’s straw hat. “It was as big as a head and pure white. . . . It weighed two or three pounds [each]. I don’t know what I did. If I knew, I’d be a millionaire.”
Now Panian, a self-effacing man with a quick smile, hopes for a similar success with the summer rotation of tomatoes, cucumbers, Anaheim peppers and string beans. And he’s putting in mounds of zucchini “because the families can use zucchini in so many ways.”
Farming, as anyone who has done it can attest, is not as easy as it looks. There’s more involved than throwing seeds in the ground and letting nature do its work. The earth needs nutrients added and weeds assassinated, and the plants themselves need water and the pruning away of diseased areas. Left untended, a garden will wither and die.
So Panian, who lives nearby, makes regular visits, sometimes daily, adding the rhythms of the earth to the rhythms of his life.
In some ways, each time Panian steps into the garden, he returns to his own past. Panian spent his Depression-era youth on a farm outside York, Pa., before the need for work drove his family first into York then westward. They settled in Oregon. Panian went to college and “became a committed urbanist,” moving to Southern California, where he spent 34 years teaching at Orange Coast before retiring 10 years ago.
Seeking a way to both keep busy and maintain his ties to Orange Coast, Panian began helping the Yetts, two of the creators of the garden. He has slowly evolved into the garden’s key figure. He credits lessons from his rural youth for his role in helping the garden thrive.
“You know what it takes,” Panian said of growing up in the country. “You can’t fight mother nature. You have to help her along.”
The garden began about 15 years ago on a different part of the campus, an unfenced lot from which Panian said most of the crops were spirited away by others. He recalls coming to the garden one day and finding that an entire crop of cauliflower had been beheaded during the night, a deed that rankled him but that also fit into his broader philosophy of growing food for the benefit of others.
Three years ago, the center received a $7,000 grant from the anti-hunger group Food for All to create the current garden, including lights and irrigation, on a former construction staging area next to the children’s center.
“Everything died the first year,” Groetsch said. “Hank could have given up, but he persevered.”
Tons of fresh soil had to be added to offset the dense-packed clay. Most of the plants now are grown in elevated beds filled with soil amended with manure and other organic compounds.
“The first year, not even weeds would grow,” Panian said. “There weren’t even worms. This year, for the first time, we had lots of worms.”
It seems a small thing, the emergence of worms to aerate and fertilize Panian’s dark earth. But like the few hours a week Panian puts into the garden, their work spreads far beyond their reach.
From those small efforts grow sustenance, and joy.
