Jail Greens

SAN FRANCISCO -- Cathrine Sneed believes that growing vegetables can transform a person - especially one who grew up on street corners getting into trouble. She thinks gardening can teach someone who has spent much of their youth in jail the first glimmer self respect. Sneed says she has seen this happen, over and over again, at the two gardens she farms with a crew of workers who've never held a job before. I'm not sure if it's the gardening that works these miracles, or some other magic going on at her Garden Project, but she has the uncanny ability to get the most unlikely people to gently pick baby lettuces and meticulously weed broccoli beds. One day I became one of them.

At 8:30 a.m. one potentially rainy morning I reported to the Garden Project office at Pier 28 as a volunteer.

Eighteen other people milled around the second-floor suite, half of them in gardening clothes, the others in street clothes topped with red SWAP vests, (they were performing community service in lieu of jail time).

Undifferentiated, we piled into two rattly old vans and inched back toward downtown - instead of out to the gardens - in almost gridlocked traffic.

We ended up on Nob Hill at Grace Cathedral. The church administration had contracted with the Project to do landscaping. A SWAP person named Barbara and I worked together, pulling microscopic weeds that looked like grass from small patches of shrubbery around the church.

Barbara turned out to be an experienced gardener and a former Garden Project employee who, she told me, got caught hanging out with the wrong kind of people. She was smart, vivacious, and on day 14 of a 27-day sentence, which she worked off two days a week.

Barbara knew exactly what she was doing. She followed directions, literally pulling up only the tiny weeds, leaving cigarette butts and bits of garbage where they lay. I figured out the Grace Cathedral job was as much janitorial as gardening work and picked up everything. As people walked by and stared at us - something I might do myself if I were walking by - I identified entirely with my fellow workers. After all, I was down on the sidewalk examining the dirt with them, not walking my pooping dog around Nob Hill. After some double entendre about a straight hoe someone was using for heavy weeding, a joke quickly cut off by Sneed, I heard Barbara's story. One of 11 now grown children, she lives in a new subsidized townhouse near the Civic Center with her mother, who is afflicted with high blood pressure and adult-onset diabetes. Barbara takes care of her while running a juice-distribution system.

We left after an hour's work, returning to the vans and heading off to Bayview/Hunters Point, the radio tuned to mellow KBLX. No rap and no jokes about "hoes" in this organization.

The Carroll Street garden stretches down a long 3/4 of an acre of land behind a tall wooden fence in back of the Just Desserts commissary. The owner of the bakery, Elliot Hoffman, secured the land for the organization.

Even in the middle of winter, the garden is productive. Shiny red and green chard and curly mustard greens stand proudly in formation on raised beds of black soil. Young red oakleaf and greenleaf lettuces hug the ground next to waist-high bushes of rosemary. Beds of young broccoli are covered with long white sheets of cloth-like paper to keep heat in and snails out. Pieces of cardboard are scattered around chard beds as snail traps. The snails crawl under the cardboard at night for warmth. In the morning, the gardeners lift the cardboard and crush the congregations of snails. This is an organic garden - labor intensive and chemical-free.

We get down on our knees and pull up the bright green weeds covering the ground underneath the chard. Rain has made the soil soft and even I can clean up a bed fairly quickly. Most satisfying. Then we harvest the little lettuces by cutting them off near the ground. We break off the chard and mustard greens leaf by leaf at the bottom of their stems. We pull up green garlic and chioggia beets, much treasured by tony restaurants.

As we work, George, who wears 44 tough years in a deeply lined face, tells me his story. "I came from nowhere. I was on the streets at 11 and I've been in and out of jail until four years ago. It occurred to me during my last bust, when I reached down to get the crack I dropped as I was being arrested, that I had lost any natural sense of survival. It was more important to protect the crack than it was to stay out of jail. Something clicked. When I was let out in 1993 I stopped using everything - drugs, alcohol - and got a job with Cathrine. Now I'm a peer counselor here. I can talk to people, people like me.

They're real easy to spot - lost kids who never had any parents, any schooling, any job. You see them on street corners everywhere. This is the first job they've ever had. This is the first time they've had any peace in their lives. When you work in the garden, it's quiet. You can think about yourself. I tell them my story. I listen to theirs. I tell them that if you can grow a vegetable, you can grow yourself. You can weed out all the bad stuff and grow into something good. It's the first time anyone's even talked to these kids."

We break for lunch. Sneed puts out a pot of lentil stew she's made the night before and some rice she cooked that morning in the office. We eat out of Styrofoam cups. I imagine the stew will taste like jail food, watery and bland, but it turns out to be deeply flavored. I restrain myself after two cups, though I want Roxy's portion. She's a troublesome SWAP assignee (20 years old, 11th-grade education, bad attitude, no children) who won't even try it. "Aren't we gonna get some Kentucky Fried Chicken?" she whines. "It's so good," I tell her. "You should taste it." I realize that I can't help myself when it comes to pushing people to eat something delicious. She thinks I'm crazy and sits on a rock and scowls. If Cathrine Sneed believes in the transforming qualities of the garden, I believe in the power of tasty food.

Having weeded, harvested, washed and packed chard, mustard greens, green garlic, lettuces and chioggia beets, we get into the vans once again and head south to the jail. Our van barely makes it up the grade to San Bruno on 280. The engine labors and starts to burn. I'm worried but no one seems bothered, including our driver, a long-time Garden Project employee, who maneuvers into the slow lane and gets us onto what seems like a country road until it curves around to reveal a monolithic art deco edifice behind miles of cyclone fence - the County Jail. Everyone in the van quiets as we approach the gate and parking area where a crowd of deputies stand by their cars drinking coffee - "rookies" someone in the van says. After checking in with the guard, we drive around to the side of the jail to a huge area of cultivated land that actually looks like a farm.

In fact, the jail was a functioning farm until 1972. When Sheriff Michael Hennessey took over the administration in 1982, he saw the job-training potential in the farm and revived it. He hired Sneed to teach women inmates how to grow vegetables. Sneed envisioned the transformational possibilities and with Hennessey's help, developed the current Garden Project program for parolees, the homeless, the unemployed and welfare recipients. She has had documented success with her clients. The recidivism rate for the 2,500 former Garden Project employees hovers around 30 percent instead of the 90 percent common for the whole population of former county jail prisoners.

Unlike the Carroll Street garden, which is located in a balmy microclimate, the jail farm lies on a ridge whipped by incessant Bay winds. Let me tell you: working at the jail is no cup of tea. We trudged out to the long, fenced-off beds, deer watching us on one side of the garden, wild geese hungrily eying us on the other. All had brazenly supped on the young collard greens, broccoli and chard of the winter garden, the deer working their way in through weak spots in the fence.

The day had become grayer, wetter and colder. The rich black soil in the garden had become soggy, the trenches full of water. My boots sank into the ground with every step, collecting a carapace of mud. You couldn't weed on hands and knees or you'd become soaked, so you had to bend over to work. Mainly, we harvested the tender centers of collard greens - the plants left uneaten by the geese - putting the leaves into big waxed boxes that would later be delivered to soup kitchens.

At one point during the day, Sneed gives her inspirational pep talk to the Garden Project workers and any SWAP people who happen to be there. The metaphors she uses - nurturing, growing, raising the human spirit - become palpable to her employees as they work through the seasons and see the results in both vegetable production and their own potential.

Today she held forth in the greenhouse, where she had arranged for the Garden Project's twice-a-week bookkeeper to instruct us about orchids. Someone had given a large collection of orchids to the Garden Project and it sorely needed attention. The bookkeeper, pretty, slender and old-fashioned in dress and hair, the way orchid lovers tend to be, stood right up there and explained how orchids worked. She showed us colorful blooms in Chinese porcelain she brought from home, pointing out that the high cost of each plant could be justified by cut-flower savings. Considering that most of her audience were lucky to be living indoors, she was throwing out some pretty theoretical stuff. But a crew divided and repotted about 40 of the plants and were excited about the possibilities of orchids as a legal cash crop. Any project that keeps people out of jail, teaches them how to work and gives them self-esteem is encouraged by Sneed.

At 2:30 we quit because the SWAP people had to be driven back. I pondered my day in the garden as we drove back in the vans, thankfully downhill, thawing out. The experienced Garden Project employees I gardened next to had taught me a lot. Working happily and self-confidently, they knew about the eventual vegetable payoff. I realized that it's the slow pace of the garden that drives me crazy. I want to see immediate results. But I think I have real potential as a harvester. I loved that part. I know how many just-picked organic vegetables a restaurant kitchen can use. I saw how many boxes could be harvested if the Garden Project had more labor and a better distribution system. I wondered why this wasn't happening. Maybe I expect too much.

For those who already know how to garden and are at peace with the pace of it, or those who want to experience organic gardening in two Bay Area micro-climates, the Garden Project needs more workers, especially from mid-February sowing through the last major harvest in November. Though Sneed has 50 people on her Garden Project waiting list, she doesn't have the money to pay their $6.50 an hour salaries. So volunteers - and donations - are always welcome. Once they know the ropes, volunteers report directly to the Carroll Street garden, and then get to the jail garden in vans. I promise that if you volunteer, you will learn much more than gardening by the end of the day. Call the Garden Project office at (415) 243-8558 to sign on.