Yardwork: A bitter melon grows in Boston

Outside/In

NHPR

Society & Culture, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Nature, Science

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2022

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Some people see something special happening at the Berkeley Community Garden in Boston’s South End: a multicultural garden community built from the rubble of a demolished city block; a green oasis of Chinese plants like bitter melon, cultivated here for over half a century. But others… well, all they see is a trash pile. In the final installment of Yardwork, the story of how a predominantly immigrant community garden is shaping the built environment, even as gentrification threatened its existence. Featuring: Arlene Ng, Kim Szeto, Chun Lee, Sue Fong Lee, Helen Ng, Fanny, Ada, Sarah Hutt, Jeremy Liu, Betsy Johnson, Ann McQueen, Valerie Burns SUPPORT Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In. Subscribe to our FREE newsletter. Follow Outside/In on Instagram or Twitter, or join our private discussion group on Facebook LINKS Official Berkeley Community Garden Website Adversity Can Help A Garden To Grow (NYTimes) Berkeley Community Gardeners Master Growing...Up (WBUR) The Trustees of Reservations now owns and manages the Berkeley Community Garden. But many organizations have supported the garden through the decades, including: Boston Natural Areas Network (Wikipedia) South End Lower Roxbury Open Space Land Trust (Wikipedia) Boston Urban Gardeners Mel King was instrumental in making community gardens in Boston possible. In 1974 he sponsored the MA Gardening and Farm Act, which passed into law and allowed people to farm and garden on vacant public land. He was honored in 2021 by then acting mayor of Boston, Kim Janey. CREDITS Host: Nate Hegyi Reported and produced by Felix Poon Editing by Taylor Quimby and Nate Hegyi Additional editing help from Jessica Hunt and Justine Paradis. Rebecca Lavoie is our Executive Producer Special thanks to Michelle Slater, Julie Stone, Zach Nowak, Mark Gardner, Michelle de Lima, Vidya Tikku, Peter Bowne, Jessica Holden, Lauren Chooljian Nick Capodice, Jason Moon, Christina Phillips, and Eileen Poon. Music for this episode by Walt Adams, Blue Dot Sessions, and Airae Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Imagine the opening scene of a movie, a dolly shot with a camera swooping over a major
0:09.1	city, in this case the south end of Boston, which by the way is not the same neighborhood
0:15.2	as the infamous south Boston or south east, here in the south end you see a lot of swanky
0:20.2	bars and restaurants, fancy cars parked outside Victorian brick row houses where the condos
0:28.3	go for millions of dollars. And then as the camera passes over this neighborhood, it swoops
0:37.4	down towards what's essentially a one acre farm, where predominantly Chinese gardeners
0:43.6	take a break from tending to their plots to chat and share jokes over lunch. It's called
0:52.9	the Berkeley community garden. And this is more than your typical veggie patches and
0:58.4	raised beds, the trellises here are made from upcycled trash, things like bed frames,
1:04.8	refrigerator shelving, and window screens. The structures themselves stand over each
1:09.4	square plot like these makeshift rooms, just overflowing with vegetation and you see
1:16.4	levels of different types of vegetables being grown, some in the ground, some large melons
1:22.9	hanging down sort of into the middle space, and even on top of the trellis yet a different
1:27.8	type of maybe beans or something else being grown.
1:32.5	This type of growing is called vertical gardening. It allows you to grow more produce on less
1:36.7	land, zoom in closer and you'll see that the melons here, they're not cantaloupe or
1:41.9	honeydew. The Chinese gardeners here grow fuzzy melon and bitter melon on the trellises.
1:47.7	It's a really important vegetable in the Chinese community. I mean, it has tremendous
1:52.9	nutritional benefits, but it is lumpy, it is wordy, and as its name implies, it's extremely
2:01.9	bitter, extremely, extremely bitter. It's in all ways this affront to sort of a classic
2:09.4	western aesthetic. This is Jeremy Leo by the way. The former director of the Asian Community
2:14.5	Development Corporation based in Boston's Chinatown. He says having this garden here,
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