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Seeds of Love: Neighborhood's gardeners, chefs to hold fundraising dinner for boy
Journal Photo by Lauren Carroll
Bill Watkins, one of the coordinators of the six main gardens participating in the support effort for 3-year-old Errol Clifford, works in his own garden.
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Published: September 12, 2009
In Washington Park, gardens large and small are connected by a common thread: The neighborhood has united to support a 3-year-old boy who has just had his third open-heart surgery.
Errol Clifford suffers from several serious medical problems, including pulmonary atresia.
"At birth, the right ventricle of his heart did not really exist," said his mother, Cary Clifford. "Errol suffers from a host of other problems associated with chromosomal defects," Clifford said.
The surgeries have often been accompanied by unexpected complications, and Errol's medical bills are astronomical. Even though they have medical insurance, Clifford and her husband, Jonathan Milner, said they spent $40,000 of their own money on his past two surgeries.
"We have been drowning in medical bills, even in the interest on medical bills," Clifford said. "We are incredibly grateful to the hundreds of people who are involved" in helping raise money.
Eddie Ingle, a neighbor friend of the Cliffords, wanted to gather the community to support the family. He came up with the idea of creating a borderless community garden.
"The idea came from a community dining project called Supplement Dining. It is where you get a bunch of people together and offer them a great meal as well as educate them about a particular food item," Ingle wrote in an e-mail.
After reading about Clifford and her Camino Bakery in the Winston-
Salem Journal, Ingle said that it seemed as if they were having a hard time keeping up with Errol's medical bills.
"I thought that it would be a good idea to have one big neighborhood dinner party to raise money to pay for Errol's medical bills as well as give my neighbors a really good reason to get out their shovels and plant their own gardens."
Residents are contributing what their gardens yield as the ingredients for a fundraising dinner of locally produced food that will be prepared by local chefs.
Mary Haglund, the owner of Mary's of Course, helped to organize chefs from Meridian, Sweet Potatoes, Mooney's Mediterranean and La Botana.
"I really didn't have to do anything," she said. "We are all professional chefs, and each has their specialty. Presented with the home-grown food, we will just do what we do. We all just love these people so much," she said." The project (Seeds of Love for Errol) is aptly named."
Living large
Rebecca Fuller and Bill Watkins have taken on the garden coordination. They gave me a tour around Washington Park to see some of the garden spots that will help fill the pot.
Six gardens form the core of the project, but it has taken on a larger life with offshoots, such as gathering blackberries in Washington Park to make preserves to sell in the days before the dinner. The six gardens that make up the core were all created to support the project. Ingle said that another six to 10 gardens will contribute produce from their patches. The volunteers have grown from 10 to about 25.
We stopped and visited with Mark Cline, sampling a fig from his towering shrub. Cline was one of many who donated figs for preserves. On one Saturday morning, they ended up with 91 jars. In another seven-hour session, five people shucked and stripped five bushels of corn. Similar efforts produced zucchini bread, blackberry jam and lots of tomato sauce that will be on the menu.
Steve McGuiness has artfully combined ornamentals and edibles in a mixed-foundation planting. Okra mingled with elephant ears, salvias and a ring of tomatoes surround a China fir.
Throughout the neighborhood, small gardens have sprung up in answer to the call.
At Eddie Ingle and Katy O'Kennedy's place, cucumbers, beans, peppers and basil are in the front border. Out back, zucchini and herbs have their own space.
Fuller and Watkins have tomatoes and Brussels sprouts, and a nice fig is carefully netted to keep out the birds.
Down Cascade a few blocks, the garden of Charles and Laura Turner turned out zucchini for the project. (In an adjacent garden, the Turners and about 10 members of Home Moravian Church have produced over 600 pounds of vegetables. They have been contributed to Sunnyside Ministries and Samaritan Soup Kitchen. But that's another story.)
A group worked on harvesting, grating and freezing zucchini while it was abundant. They have since made zucchini bread. There should be about 30 loaves for the dinner.
The abundance of the summer garden serves as a model of generosity for which Seeds of Love for Errol was built on.
But like a handful of tossed seeds, friendships and relationships have also sprouted all over the community.
Interdependence
"I think that we spend so much time trying to act like everything is fine, you just realize a lot of people have issues," Rebecca Fuller said. "We've gotten to know each other without the facade. A lot of things have happened to this group of people over this period of time: Jobs have been lost, relationships broken. We really know each other now."
"As we started down this process," Ingle said, "We quickly realized that it is not just about raising money to pay for Errol's medical bills past and future. It is also about bringing people in the neighborhood and Greater Winston-Salem together. I cannot tell you how many people have made new, lifelong connections in the neighborhood as a result of this project."
"The project has strengthened our ties to our neighbors, expanded our knowledge of the needs of others, and offered all of us a renewed hope that we just might make a difference for good in the neighborhood and the world," Laura Turner said.
I get the feeling this is only the beginning of a very good thing.
Mayor Allen Joines will open the event. There will be an auction, a raffle, music by the Darnell Woodies and great local food that has been lovingly prepared.
Paintings, garden designs, evening sailboat cruises and many other wonderful raffle items are featured on the Web site, www.seedsofloveforerrol.com.
The Seeds of Love for Errol Dinner will be at 6:30 p.m. next Saturday at the Vintage Theatre in Washington Park. Tickets, $40, are available by calling 816-7333 or e-mailing Eddie Ingle at eingle@unifi.com.
Question of the week
Hi David: My milkweed has a lot of yellow bugs on the stems, and there are practically no leaves left. Is it too late to do something about it? -- Regina
Dear Regina: The orange bugs you see on your milkweed are oleander aphids. Look your plants over carefully to see if you find any of the striped caterpillars of the monarch butterfly. Two inches long when full grown, they are inconspicuous when first hatched so check carefully. The caterpillar is striped yellow, black and white. If you don't see any, you can spray the aphids off with a burst of water from a garden hose, hand crush them by rubbing the leaf undersides or spray them with insecticidal soap. You do not, however, want to disturb the monarch caterpillars. About a dozen insects are adapted to feed exclusively on milkweed, which exudes a sticky latex that is toxic to most insects. Aphids commonly begin to appear as the weather cools, and the bright yellow-orange creatures on your plants are very common.
■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
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