Jesse Pease and the Miller Community Garden

It’s the last one left in Gary—the Miller community garden in the 400 block of Lake Street—thanks to Jesse Pease and a few other dedicated volunteers.

Jesse, who started gardening with family members when she was young, believes it is more than an aesthetic pursuit. Before coming to Miller she lived in a retreat center community where everyone worked in the garden. As the head gardener, she planned, ordered and planted. That garden was entirely vegetables and herbs, but designed and planted in a geometric pattern to be beautiful as well as functional. The designer modeled if after a sacred design with arches forming shapes, pointing outward.

Jesse sees the Miller community garden as a pleasant and clean place for people to learn, communicate, sit on a log and enjoy. The original purpose was to clean up a space and make it better, and even though it still gets dumped on, the junk does get picked up.

The garden, one of five in Gary at one time, was started when Doreen Carey obtained a grant through the Gary Illegal Dumping Task Force, an initiative to replace brown fields and other eyesores with community gardens. Kiyo Davis, the Krisley family and Jesse built the beds. Don Pascow, Tommie Daniels, Mary Balez, June Reister and the Schough family have helped in the garden over the years. Sue and Lyle Addley-Warrick (who recently moved from Miller) worked from the beginning, designing the size, shape and placement of the beds. And, Dr. Lance Olsen of the Insight Vision Center next door to the garden supplies the water.

But now the grant money’s gone—the last of it used to buy a weed wacker—so if the gardeners want the lumber to add more beds and wooden fencing to give it more definition there will have to be fundraising involved. With limited human resources and no financial backing, they’re certainly open to ideas.

The Lake Street community garden has five beds of native plants and vegetables. Each bed is the responsibility of an individual or group. Since the gardeners want to educate people about natural landscaping, the long front bed is all native plants: Butterfly Weed, Wild Bergamot, Showy Goldenrod, Coneflowers, Switch Grass and Big and Little Blue Stem Grasses. The four other beds are dedicated to vegetables, although they’ve found one to be too shady. Their production so far: squash, tomatoes and a pumpkin that sadly ended up in pieces on Lake Street one night.

As Jesse describes it, the volunteers who’ve stuck with Miller’s garden are feeling lonely. They need more dedicated people who are willing to work and who share the beliefs expressed in the phrase contributed by the Addley-Warricks: Gardening Renews Earth’s Energy and Neighborhood (GREEN).