DOWN TOWN
HOME & GARDEN
DIGGIN’ DOWNTOWN A visit to Zoë Shear’s Old East Durham garden proves fruitful in both produce and knowledge B Y A M A N DA M AC L AR E N P HOTO G RA PH Y B Y JO HN MICHAE L SIMP SO N
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homemade wood trellis lined with rows of twine stands as a stark skeleton against the wilting remnants of summer in Zoë Shear’s backyard. She mimics how she utilized a technique called the Florida Weave to string up her nearly 30 tomato plants tightly and economically with biodegradable twine. Yet even now, ghosts of the bounty that she created bring forth new life. The straw bales that once held dozens of tomato varieties this past summer are now home to edible mushroom starts. “After I harvest the mushrooms from the straw, my expectation is that the bales will be fully rendered into rich, black, beautiful compost that I can use to top off my beds come spring!” Zoë says. The multi-uses she derives from the straw bales are but one of the many methods that Zoë employs to maximize the utility of her quarter-acre lot in Old East Durham. It’s an idea that she discovered – along with the framework for her trellis – in a book on straw bale gardening by the self-described “NC Tomato Man,” Craig LeHoullier. “One of my big considerations when gardening is, ‘What can I do for cheap?’” Zoë says. “It gets really expensive, really fast.” She previously grew her tomatoes in five-gallon grow bags, but soon realized that wasn’t a sustainable method when it came to the need to fertilize regularly and within the confines of a small space. “Right now, for what I call the ‘bougie’ dirt, I’m spending, like, $20 a bag, and it’s only 1½ cubic feet,” she says. “That stinks. So if you want to garden on 64
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october/november 2022
this scale, you have to be able to make your own dirt. [Going with straw bales] seemed like a no contest in terms of having less disease, more control. It gave me everything that I wanted from the bags, but also the biodegradability aspect and the ability to use it year over year.” She also makes her own “sweet, sweet ‘bougie’ dirt” by composting other plant material that’s not blighted by disease. “I would really like to get into vermiculture,” she says, “but right now I use – as if I hired them, ha! – black soldier fly larvae. They are extremely fast composters. I took a video of them the other day, just nibbling away.”
PASSION PROJECT Zoë’s abundant enthusiasm for gardening stems from the neighbors who lived next door to her childhood home in Silver Spring, Maryland, before her family moved to Durham about 15 years ago. “We had a brick retaining wall next to our driveway,” she explains, “and they used the entire strip next to it to garden. Everything was beautiful and pristine, every single year. Some of my earliest memories were admiring that garden, pestering them while they were working in that