Voltaire Had it Right: Tend your Garden!

"I also know", said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden."
"You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born to rest."
"Let us work without reasoning," said Martin, "it is the only way to make life endurable."

NagyDiofa  Community Garden today

Voltaire had it right when he wrote Candide. You can fill your head with all manner of nonsense and trivia, but the best way to settle down and feel... normal?... is to cultivate your garden. That is very sound advice in the world we live in today, crowded as it is with competing outrage, threats, and tragedy. Our little green world is a plot of community garden land sitting just below our upstairs window. About 45 plots are held by  diverse set of local residents, and about four years ago we got lucky and took over an abandoned parcel. At first it looked like a bit of dry dust, but over the years that has been fixed with lots of organic compost. And egg shells. And Fumie's labor. The garden is mostly her baby. She can work on it for hours, planning and scheming compost strategies and planting schedules like a General planning an invasion offensive. 

Breaking ground 

We live in an old building surrounding a courtyard in what was once - and to a large extent, still is - the Budapest Jewish Ghetto. Not exactly a green country paradise. In fact, our address is a listed "Yellow Star House" - during the holocaust Jews in Budapest were forced out of homes outside of the official ghettos and restricted to living in Yellow Star houses. The building itself is not exactly conducive to agricultural pursuits. It gets little sun, and is increasingly turning into a rabbit hutch of cheap Air B&Bs housing large groups of loud, drunken British stag parties on weekends.

There are only about four or five flats left in our building that are still home to actual residents. One way to let the tourists know that your part of the gangway is not a part of the communal lobby is to hang plants from the railing. Fumie excels in balcony botany. she has a selection of flowers along with peppers, herbs, and even a giant cabbage plant which was threatening to turn into a cabbage tree.

These old buildings were all built around a central courtyard. Klauzal ter, where we are located, is still in the center of the old Jewish community of downtown Pest. Before WWII there were a lot of Jewish tailors in the neighborhood, and they competed for status by trying to outdo each other for the largest flats. A single apartment could be over ten rooms and take up half a floor of the building. Since few needed so much space, they subdivided the flats into smaller apartments, usually accessible to a shared bathroom at the end of the gangway outside. After the Holocaust, bustling Klauzal ter became an undeveloped backwater neighborhood, and the flats were separated into individual state owned apartments, with many going to rural Gypsy families who found employment in the post-war period revival of bombed out Budapest, mainly removing rubble from the streets and construction labor. When I was a kid I remembered seeing these piles of rocks and bomb rubble on street corners all along the boulevards of Pest. One of the last rubble piles was in the space where the garden is located today. 

Treviso lettuce 

Most of the soil here was trucked in, so with the addition of compost - which the garden produces in several huge bins along the walls - the soil is pretty healthy. We have been eating salads from our own lettuce and ruccola since march.  We have been using it to produce vegetables we couldn't normally find in Hungary - things like okra, ruccola, and Italian eggplants. 

We are flying to the USA tomorrow, so for the next month we have friends who will look after our plants and water the garden, but I definitely do not think I will be able to find any tomatoes or cukes that can match what we grow. Nor will we be able to enjoy a nice strudel at the corner pastry shop in the afternoon after a day in the garden. But... there will be clams... and pizza. And more surprises.