Dunwoody Food Gardeners #2: Meet Angela Minyard

I first heard of Angela Minyard when she left this comment on the Dunwoody Food Gardeners group on our social networking site:

I will have a pretty big veggie garden this year. Last year I had wonderful tomatoes (Better Boy), and this year I am expanding.

I'm using a modified raised bed style, which doesn't have wood surrounding it. There are four 4'x8' beds, with 18" paths between and around them. I also have 3 to 4 foot beds along the fence lines surroundng them.

So far I have planted cucumbers next to a teepee trellis. I plan to put lettuce under the teepee, to give filtered shade. The only other thing planted so far is zucchini. I have extra zucchini plants to give away if anyone wants any, they are organic.

I am also working on a large herb garden in the front of my house.

After I did the post on Van Malone's garden, I asked Angela if I could feature hers next. So this past Saturday morning at 8 AM (I love coming across other morning people!), I arrived less than a mile away from my home at a house I had never seen before. Angela was puttering in the front yard, where flowers and herbs abounded. A giant sunflower towered over the front door, having been planted there by a bird. A fig tree, already pregnant with undulating fruit, spread its arms gloriously on the side of the house, and the clover-studded pesticide-free lawn was a soft green carpet that carried us to the back, under the power lines, where Angela's vegetable garden was enjoying its annual expansion.

"Since my lawn has no chemicals, I can use the grass clippings to mulch paths," Angela told me, and sure enough, her garden paths were growing in each direction, week by week, with each new grass cutting.

Curly kale stood like sentries at the wrought iron fence that separated her garden from her neighbor's, the tips of corn poking up from his soil so dark and rich that it was still giving off the steam of decomposition.

A teepee made from crepe myrtle branches welcomed the climbing cucumbers. Tomato plants grown from seed lined up like schoolchildren who hold their arms out to "give enough room" in between. Squashes stretched their enormous leaves as the morning sun speckled across this hidden oasis in a suburban backyard.

"I wish people knew how easy it is to grow free food," Angela told me. "So many people think it is hard. We should just show each other. We should have a free tour of vegetable gardens."

Angela and I are kindred spirits, not just because we're both veggie gardeners (and there is something of the scientist and the dreamer about every veggie gardener I've ever met) but because we grew up 20 minutes from each other! Angela is from Merrick, Long Island, by way of Brooklyn. She told me how the neighborhood in which she grew up was full of mulberry bushes and the children always had purple feet. And then she said the part I thought was sweetest: "And that was a good thing."

After leaving Angela, I just kept thinking about that line, over and over, and wondering when was the last time I saw a Dunwoody child with purple feet.