Interview with Lisa Bashert

Omer Jean Winborn: Hello, my name is Omer Jean Winborn Dixon. And today I'm interviewing Lisa Bashert, and would you mind stating your name for the recording?

Lisa Bashert: It's Lisa Bashert.

Omer Jean Winborn: Would you mind telling us what year you were born and where?

Lisa Bashert: I was born in 1957, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Omer Jean Winborn: And could you tell us the name of your parents?

Lisa Bashert: Oh yeah. My dad was Jimmy Marshall, Sr., and my mom, Phyllis Marie Marshall.

Omer Jean Winborn: How many siblings did you have?

Lisa Bashert: I had four siblings. I have two sisters and two brothers.

Omer Jean Winborn: Any other details that you wanted to share about your family?

Lisa Bashert: Well, my sister was married to a farmer and so my oldest sister, the one who's 77 now and she owned a farm and so I first got involved in agriculture working at her farm as a kid.

Omer Jean Winborn: Okay. Could you tell us briefly, generally about yourself?

Lisa Bashert: Yeah. I come from a real musical Irish family. My dad was a band leader and he passed away two years ago, right around this time, and my mother three years ago. My mom started working when I was around 12 and she never missed a day of work, so she had perfect attendance when she retired. She worked for the church a great deal and she made around 50, 60 quilts in her lifetime.

Omer Jean Winborn: Wow.

Lisa Bashert: She was an award-winning quilter in the local kinds of shows.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh my goodness.

Lisa Bashert: And I have many of her quilts, I'm the only one of her daughters who also quilts. And my dad pretty much played music 24-7, he always had the guitar in his hands and that's a beautiful memory for me. Last thing I would hear before going to bed at night, I could hear him playing. And he played from... He led this band of his from about age 10 to about 90. And the last few years of his life he would go into assisted living places and play music and then he would make the joke, " If I didn't have this guitar they wouldn't let me out of here." [laughter]

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh, that's beautiful.

Lisa Bashert: He was a very funny guy and very well known locally, a lot of people knew of him.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh, that's wonderful.

Lisa Bashert: Yes. So It was an interesting place to grow up in South Jersey in a real agricultural area. Yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: Could you tell us when you came to live in Ypsilanti?

Lisa Bashert: Yeah, I...

Omer Jean Winborn: Or thereabouts, what year?

Lisa Bashert: Well, I came to the University of Michigan for college after one year at Holy Cross in Massachusetts. And then I transferred to the UofM and that was in 1977 and then I lived in Ann Arbor for a few years and gardened in a few different community gardens there, and then I moved to Ypsi in '88 when... Or '87, around then. My daughter was severely burned and she was in the hospital at Mott for a whole month and after we got out of the hospital then we 00:04:00moved in with some friends on Pearl Street in Ypsi. And I did go back for a couple of years to Ann Arbor but then permanently in Ypsi around 1990.

Omer Jean Winborn: Wow. Thank you for sharing.

Lisa Bashert: Yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: But where did you live for most of your life?

Lisa Bashert: Well, most of my life I'd say I live in Ypsi.

Omer Jean Winborn: Okay.

Lisa Bashert: Now from 1990 to the present, same house on Grant Street up by the water tower and I just love Ypsilanti, I love living here and I used to refer to Ypsi as my ecovillage, that I'm drawing into Ypsi all the things that I need for happiness. So. [laughter]

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh, that's wonderful. What's your earliest memory of growing food? If you feel comfortable sharing that?

Lisa Bashert: Well, the first job that I had growing food on my sister's farm was picking blueberries. And in South Jersey it's high bush blueberries so they're about 6 foot tall, so I was a 10-year-old and I was picking blueberries from the 6 foot tall bushes, and very often there would have been either rain or irrigation and so you'd be standing up to your ankles in mud and the blazing sun would be coming down, the bushes aren't high enough to give you any shade and it was like a sauna in there picking blueberries and they paid you 10 cents for a pint of 00:06:00blueberries and 25 cents for a quart and that was my first job. And as I told you earlier, I could only work on the farm because it was a family member otherwise in New Jersey you had to be 14.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh. Okay.

Lisa Bashert: So I worked several years picking berries before age 14. Yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh wow. Were there any other experiences that you wanna tell us about picking the blueberries? What else did they have on the farm then?

Lisa Bashert: In South Jersey this is called a truck farm and that means, it was all vegetables. There were no animals. There was no, like, cows or pigs or anything, just all vegetables. And my brother-in-law was... It was a, what do you call it, when the, it was a centennial farm where his family had farmed for I guess a hundred years.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh wow.

Lisa Bashert: Yeah. He was the only son of his dad. And so, when he went into kidney failure, that land was lost to development. But when I was a kid, when I was a child and worked there, it had been a going concern for a lot of years. And I would say there were probably, geez, many, many other farmers in the area that assisted one another, would come in and help with different harvests. The people in trucks were always stopping by just to chat with him. And so, I knew a lot of other farmers and it was a huge time of transition because after, or at the time when he became ill and then up to his death, all of those 00:08:00farmers that I knew all got out of the business because of development and agricultural policy and so forth. And, I remember at his funeral, I was shocked to learn that of all the different people who were there, only one was still farming.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh my goodness.

Lisa Bashert: Yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: Wow.

Lisa Bashert: But what they would do is they would harvest everything on Friday evening and then drive up to the Philly farmer's market. And I would be part of packing the truck, getting the truck ready to drive up to Philadelphia. And so he'd spend the day there selling the produce. And now later on my sister would have a little... Well there was always a vegetable stand at the house. It's kind of surrounded by all the fields. And then there was also a little creek that went around three quarters of the property. And, there was a swamp back there where a lot of discarded stuff. And my first car was a Volkswagen Beetle that was pulled out of that swamp and repaired for me to drive.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh wow.

[laughter]

Omer Jean Winborn: That's wonderful.

Lisa Bashert: It's true.

Omer Jean Winborn: So how old were you when this took place? About how old were you?

Lisa Bashert: When the VW, I was a senior in college when I got this or I might've been a junior.

Omer Jean Winborn: So you were still farming?

Lisa Bashert: Yeah, I worked at the farm up until, well, I came back my first year after college and worked. But then, so that was, I think I was 20, I usually say I worked there from age 10 to age 20. Because I transferred, I had an extra year in college, so it was five years. So after the first two years, first at Holy Cross, and then at UofM, I came home and worked at the farm.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh, that's wonderful.

Lisa Bashert: And then I didn't after that. Yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: That was wonderful. Can you tell us about your gardens here in Ypsilanti? Would you tell us a little bit about those?

Lisa Bashert: So when I got 00:10:00here, let's see, I'm tryna think. The first community garden I grew was in 1982 when I was carrying my daughter, my one daughter, Siân Miller. And I remember, my ex-husband at the moment, at that time, I met him in Europe. [chuckle] When I graduated college, my parents gave me a big like check for my graduation gift. And so I blew it all by going to Europe and buying a Eurail Pass and going around Europe. And I met this guy and he was juggling in a park. He was very amusing and interesting [laughter] And we finished our trip together and I ended up getting pregnant. And I said to him, before leaving Europe, I said, "I think I might be pregnant and I'll let you know." So I came home and then we spent a lot of time trying to get him into this country.

Lisa Bashert: And so he didn't get here until, well, I was five months pregnant, but somewhere in there from five to nine months, I put in my first community garden at Peace Neighborhood Center on Maple over there. And I really wanted to get into the community garden that was near my house, which was by the Lutheran Church, Zion Lutheran. But that was a little small garden and there was a waiting list and nobody could get in there. It was the most exclusive garden. 00:12:00So I didn't get in there. So I had to garden at Peace Neighborhood, which has now has all been developed and that garden is gone. But I remember we had, my ex-husband brought home this dog without checking with me. So he brought home this stray, like shepherd dog, which followed me through the garden and was eating all the... It would eat all the cherry tomatoes. [chuckle] So I remember that.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh my goodness.

Lisa Bashert: And I remember, well, Siân was born in May, so I, somehow or another, I put in that garden really early because, you know May... It was pretty early to put your garden in, but I had her in the baby seat. I was planting everything and I had that garden for a couple years. And then I had a garden at Greenview, which is another Project Grow site. And ultimately I had a plot for quite a few years at County Farm Park. And at home, I was moving around in Ann Arbor and it was all rental property, so it wasn't very easy for me to garden at home. But when Siân was about 2 years old, I lived in a little house, a little rental on Adams Street and I put a garden in the back of that house and grew some... That's when I said, oh, I'll just grow some tomatoes. How, that... Because after I had worked on the farm, I had said I'm never gardening again because it's too much work. But then I ended up basically spending my whole life gardening. So, yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: So why do you think cooperative food 00:14:00growing is so important?

Lisa Bashert: Well, I don't know why it's important, but I just know that I really enjoy doing it that way. I like doing cooperative everything. Like I worked for the Ypsi Food Co-op for the last paying job that I had. And before that I was a volunteer for a lot of years. I started the Local Honey Project at the Ypsi Food Co-op, which is a beekeeping project. And we planted, I planted a... I got donations of herbs and things, and we made this little herb garden in between the Food Co-op building and the next building. There was just a gravel alley there. And I had arranged to have somebody truck in some compost and mulch and we put in this really pretty little garden there and two beehives right there on River Street.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh, wow.

Lisa Bashert: And beekeeping was getting to be a thing because bees were endangered. And so I trained about five or six, or probably more like 10 beekeepers, but five or six of them went on to have their own businesses doing different honey related stuff, which was really fun. And I just bought some honey from one of my students this week. Now I forget your questions.

[laughter]

Omer Jean Winborn: No, you answered it.

Lisa Bashert: Why Cooperative?

Omer Jean Winborn: Perfectly. You've answered it perfectly.

Lisa Bashert: Yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: What impact has growing food had on your family and say this community?

Lisa Bashert: Well in around 2004 00:16:00at that time I was doing a lot of music. I was singing with a number of different groups. One is called Sacred Song, which does a winter concert every year. And it's a multicultural choir that I really loved and I sang with them for 15 years.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh wow.

Lisa Bashert: And yeah. And I also was... sang with the Out Loud chorus and was on the board for that. And so I was doing stuff like that, and I heard... And I was sharing a plot at County Farm Park with a neighbor who lived on the West side, or a friend who lived on the west side of Ann Arbor. And so we'd meet in the middle and garden. And at that time at 2004, I heard that someone was gonna... That people were gonna start some community gardens right in Ypsi in my neighborhood. And so I thought, wow, I wanna get involved with that. And I gardened the very first year at Recreation Park and the second year I was on the board of Growing Hope, the sponsoring organization, for a year. And I found out I don't like being on the board 'cause I like to get my hands dirty. That's what I like. So at that point in 2005, I was serving on the board of Growing Hope, but I also took over being the garden steward for Recreation Park Community Garden. And we did a lot of things like it was a partnership between the Neighborhood Association, Normal Park Neighborhood Association, the City of Ypsi, and Growing Hope to put in this community garden and several others. And Growing Hope had a mission at that time, one of their early missions was 00:18:00training people to do community gardens.

Lisa Bashert: So we did the training, I went to and attended the training. And I felt like the outreach to bring people together around gardening was great for the neighborhood. It was great for the community. I feel like when people are more invested in something, they will protect it, so people being invested in the garden, and the neighborhood and the city all leads to more investment and more caring about the city, plus I wanted to get to know my neighbors more. I'm a person who likes to know who lives in every house. I just wanna know, I don't know why. [laughter]

Lisa Bashert: I just like to know. And so I'll be the person sitting on her front porch, and if somebody goes by, I'll say, hi, what are you doing? Or like I'll say, what a cute dog, or whatever. I just like to know my neighbors and I felt the community garden would lead to that and we also, through the partnerships, we had a lot of tours. People would come, we had people come from like the Quaker meeting came to tour our community garden. For a long time, for several years, Growing Hope had a bicycle tour that went around to many different community gardens, they came to the Local Honey Project, they came to my community garden one time they came to my house garden, they came to the cooperative orchard that Finn and I worked at and that bike tour was called the Tour de Fresh, which I thought was a cute name. And 00:20:00I felt like people getting to know more about their neighbors and their neighborhood was always a good thing so, yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: Okay. Thank you for sharing.

Lisa Bashert: Yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: A wonderful story.

Lisa Bashert: Yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: How has growing, buying, and preparing food different when you were young, and then now, how is that different?

Lisa Bashert: I always thought my mother was a, like a transitional generation. Her mother probably got a live chicken and killed the chicken and plucked the chicken. And my mother was like, she didn't wanna get into any dirt connected with her food. She would go to the grocery store and she would buy, cut up pieces of chicken on a tray and wrapped in plastic. And she cooked only... My mother only would cook canned vegetables, et cetera. And when my brother-in-Law would give her food from the farm, she was not very appreciative because she didn't wanna peel the corn. And she didn't wanna get into all the preparation. She was very much can opener kind of cooking is what she wanted to do. But I got interested because I was hanging out with the ladies who... , the farmer ladies.

Lisa Bashert: There were three ladies that worked on the farm. And I often spent a lot of time with them because they would hang out in the vegetables stand, chat chat chatting about everything. And I loved to listen to them. And so they were Mrs. Mazza, Mrs. Sullivan, and my brother-in-law's mother, Maddie Hackett. And so they were kind of my… 00:22:00I don't know, I idolized them. I thought they were very fascinating. And they would talk about their relationship to the land. They would talk about what was growing. They would talk about cooking and baking and canning, and I found everything they did really fascinating, I wanted to try it. So I remember buying… things had weird measurements. A peck, I would buy a peck of, cucumbers and take them home and then I wanted to pickle them, and so I found a recipe, I made pickles. And my mother was like, I'm not eating that, we don't know what it is, it could be... [laughter]

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh my goodness.

Lisa Bashert: She was afraid of botulism, she thought I was gonna kill her. And so I did my first canning relative to what Mrs. Hackett would tell me was a good thing to try. And, also when I was working at the farm, oftentimes I would eat with the farm workers and so they would make a big lunch, and the ladies would... We would eat what was fresh and what was being harvested from the farm. And that just really impressed me, it impressed me that they had all these skills they could take a cucumber and make it into a pickle that fascinated me, and also Jersey tomatoes were like the greatest in the world, and that was what we were famous for and…’maters.

Lisa Bashert: So I didn't like to eat them, but I liked to make them into tomato sauce and so forth. And they were my early influencers. And now, of course, today I don't think there's that much interaction between the generations sometimes. I think that's really sad and missing. I don't think I was exceptional. I think when children are around, older people that they respect, they learn a lot and it's really good for them and I just remember it being, I would just hang on their every word. I wanted to hear what they were, what their experience was in the past. And I've always been interested in a concept that I call expired technology. So I always like... I'm never gonna be using tools that are like modern tools. I like to use hand tools. So like, I'll use a food mill or like when I bake, I use a pastry blender, I don't usually use a machine and I like the technology that I learned when I was a child.

[laughter]

Omer Jean Winborn: Thank you. Where's your land now? Where do you grow food?

Lisa Bashert: Well, right now I have just my home garden on Grant Street, and I have a nice big plot at Recreation Park Community Garden that I've been growing in since 2004. No, the first couple years I had a different plot, but I've been growing in this plot probably for probably at least since before 2010 anyways, yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: How did you come to that plot and could you share some of the things about how you grow on that particular plot?

Lisa Bashert: Yeah, the place where we're growing used to be a Girl Scout camp on the, in Recreation Park, which was originally the fairgrounds and you know that berm that goes around the Recreation park was a racetrack at one time for horses, I mean. And the Girl Scout camp was in a different building because when you see pictures of it, it was a regular house. And the Senior Center now is like a 1960s kind of building, brick building. So in the community garden especially, right in my plot, there was a whole bunch of construction cement and rocks and debris and stuff, and so that's the corner plot closest to the building on the east side of the garden. And when I first started gardening, Margaret Johnson was gardening that plot, and she was nearly a hundred years old.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh, my goodness.

Lisa Bashert: She lived on Sheridan Street and she was a founder of the Ypsi Food Co-op. And so I knew her that way. And Margaret, she would grow stuff in that plot and I was right next to her and I was, again I really enjoyed listening to her stories. And when she stopped gardening, she eventually went to Glacier Hills, I believe, and I believe she lived to be practically 102, driving the whole time. 00:28:00When I was working at the Food Co-op, she was still driving down there from Sheridan. And so I ended up taking over Margaret's plot and she got a lot of the rocks and cement and stuff out of there. And I continued, I started thinking maybe I'll ask one of my neighbors to build me a raised bed, like the one that Pat Wells is using in our community garden that was built. Well you asked earlier about why gardening and community is so important, so do you remember when we used to have Ypsi Pride?

Omer Jean Winborn: Yes.

Lisa Bashert: Which was called, I don't remember what that acronym means, but it was a city cleanup day for the whole city. And Recreation Park used to always be one of the sites for Ypsi Pride every year. And so neighbors would come and they would say, "What do you want us to do?" And one time I said, "Build us a big raised bed." And these guys from the neighborhood for Ypsi Pride build us this beautiful raised bed that Pat is using. And people from EMU, the sports teams used to come over and they would help us get our community garden ready for the spring every year. And I really miss the citywide cleanup because that was a huge help to us for probably 20 years of the time that I have been gardening there. So each spring I would make sure I got a very buff football player to come and turn over my plot, so I can get out more of the rocks and the construction material and stuff. And now the garden is pretty, pretty nice. Like I can put a spade in there and go right up to the hilt.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh, that's wonderful.

Lisa Bashert: Yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: When thinking about history behind land and farming and gardening, what comes to mind for you?

Lisa Bashert: Yeah, let's see. Well, one of the things I had the privilege to do was to write a land acknowledgement for...

Omer Jean Winborn: Can you explain what that is?

Lisa Bashert: A land acknowledgement is a statement that a group or an organization will make acknowledging the fact that the land that we live on is stolen land. That it's land that was lived on by native people, and that Native people often, in a process that was alien to them, had their land taken away for European settlers. And so I became very interested in the Native people who lived here and did a bunch of research. And one thing I learned was that probably there were Native gardeners in the area where Recreation Park is, because that area, if you look on the old maps, you can see that that is an oak opening. Like if you look on the oldest maps of Ypsilanti called bird's eye maps you can see that the area where I live, Normal Park, the native trees never were cut.

Lisa Bashert: You can see that the forest is still pictured on that map. And that's the reason why Normal Park has all these enormous trees, is because the trees were never cut there. But in this part of the country, the place where 00:32:00Native people usually grew food were called the oak openings. So we have a lot of oaks in our neighborhood, big old trees. There's a giant old oak tree in Recreation Park on the east end. And then there's the kid's playground is all surrounded by enormous big old Oak trees. And I just have this idea that Recreation Park was at one time an oak opening, and I think people, probably Native people probably grew food there.

Lisa Bashert: And so one of the projects we did somewhere in there was we decided to plant a Three Sisters garden at Recreation Park Community Garden, which is a style of agriculture that native people used. And, it was really fascinating for me to plant that garden several years in a row because I learned so much just from the process of doing it. So our library here has a book about Native American gardening, and I use that book in order to space the... You would make little hills.

Omer Jean Winborn: Yes.

Lisa Bashert: And, plant corn in the center and then beans surrounding that. And then in between each mound and the mounds were about, if I remember correctly, around, 18 inches apart. And in between them you would plant squash. And so all the plants interact positively with one another. And this is an amazing thing that Native people learned. So the corn stalks tend to fall over from the wind.

Lisa Bashert: So if you plant beans, the beans grow up the corn stalks and anchor them to the ground and help them to stay upright, 00:34:00plus the beans, they fix Nitrogen in the soil to feed the corn. And then in between the squash have these great big leaves. And so they create a very shady, moist environment between the hills. And that also suppresses weeds so that there's less competition between the plants. And, the other thing I figured out was that once that all grows up together, and I researched and it was like, absolutely you couldn't even get in there because everything was so tightly growing together, but mutually benefiting each plant benefiting the others. And so I realized that, if you wanted to eat the green corn, the young corn, you would just harvest that from the outside of the plot. 'Cause you couldn't get into the center to get the green corn from the center, but that corn would just dry itself right on the plant.

Omer Jean Winborn: Wow.

Lisa Bashert: And the same thing with the beans, it was like a brilliant way of growing food, and so I really loved learning about that. And then we put on some signage around that garden so that people could learn about Three Sisters and learn about Native growers.

Omer Jean Winborn: Are you passing down any of these traditions to your family members?

Lisa Bashert: [laughter] I bet they're absorbing some of it just 'cause I like to talk about it. But, I was telling you, at the pre-interview that my little grandson, I feel like I'm teaching him about herbal knowledge through this game that we bought called Wildcraft. And he is so enamored of this game, he still wants to play it at age eight. We've been playing for at least four years, and it's 00:36:00a cooperative game where you start out at the bottom of the mountain and you go up to the top where you pick blueberries, and meanwhile you go through a number of different ecosystems, a farm, and then, a swamp and then a forest, et cetera. As you go up and you learn about the different herbs that grow in each of these environments, and he has learned all of these medicinal plants.

Lisa Bashert: And that is, that just thrills me it's very exciting to me that he's interested in them, he's learning about them and, I also mentioned that it's important to me that every time we talk about the different herbs, I always say to him, now, that grows right in front of Val's house, did you see that Val has echinacea growing there? And, or out where you pick blueberries in the high school woods, there's nettles that grow there, have you ever noticed them there? So I want him to relate the real time plants, the living plants with the game and with the information that he's already learning, and...

Omer Jean Winborn: That sounds wonderful. What draws you to gardening and the earth and all of that? What, could you say draws you?

Lisa Bashert: It just feels good to be in a relationship with the plants. I feel. And when I'm digging, it just doesn't matter what was wrong in my life. I always feel better when I have my hands in the dirt. And so it feels good. And also, of course I love the food that I grow, but also, I feel like I have come into relationship with the plants themselves. 00:38:00Like, people always would... People constantly would say, "Oh, I'm afraid to plant something in the garden 'cause I don't have a green thumb, and my plants are all gonna die and I'm not gonna get any harvest from them." And I always say, "Plants are living beings. They want to live, they want to produce their fruit because that's their offspring for the next generation." So, I mean, you have to remember that the plants have a directive to grow and thrive that you're just trying hopefully to get out of their way and support them and let them do their thing. People are not really in charge. [laughter]

Omer Jean Winborn: Yeah. Right.

Lisa Bashert: Yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: What do you find difficult about growing food? What's some difficulties?

Lisa Bashert: Well, in recent years I would say the unpredictability of the weather is really... I first noticed around 2012, I feel like, we had a very very droughty summer that year, and I was, I'm aging and we have a big water tank, and I feel strongly that we should use rain water if we possibly can, but that means carrying water in cans, which are very heavy, hard on my shoulders. I have rain barrels at home too, so I'm watering at home, watering at the community garden. And at that time I was also working with the Cooperative Orchard of Ypsi, and we didn't have water at that site. So from 2011 on to the present, the Cooperative Orchard still did not have any water there. And so I would fill 00:40:00five gallon buckets and put them in my car, go over there and water things. But it was very hard carrying water. So I must say in the last year or so, I have, one of those hoses that stretches. I don't know what it's called, but you turn on the water and the hose gets longer.

Omer Jean Winborn: Yeah.

Lisa Bashert: It's really cool. [laughter] So I've been using the hose a little bit more, but I really prefer to water by hand. And actually someone told me, maybe 10 years ago, somebody said, "Oh, hoses waste water." And I thought, oh you're so right. Hoses do waste water because we're going from thing to thing. We're not just watering the thing, it's running the whole time. And you know or you set it down and it keeps running. So I really vowed then that I was gonna just conserve water and use watering cans and so forth. And I still mostly do.

Lisa Bashert: So those are some of the hard things. Sometimes it's hard when neighbors hate on our garden 'cause it doesn't look pristine enough or neat enough. And I'm not a very neat gardener. I'm a messy gardener so that's a problem. And sometimes we have struggles at the community gardens with people coming in and taking, somebody told me, was it you told me about all the cabbages being 00:42:00[laughter] harvested from your garden? I had a thing happen at our garden where a woman was growing eggplants, and she came back to our garden and she had 18 eggplants that were becoming ripe, and someone had stolen all 18 of the eggplants. And this drove me so crazy that I wrote an entire novel entitled 18 Eggplants. [laughter] 'Cause I had to come up with some kind of story as to why someone would steal all 18 eggplants. I mean, you might steal one or two if you wanna eat them. Right? But why would you take all 18 of them? So I came up with a theory for my book.

Omer Jean Winborn: That sounds pretty interesting.

[laughter]

Omer Jean Winborn: I'd love to read that book.

[laughter]

Omer Jean Winborn: Are there ways that growing food connects you to your ancestors or to other people who came before you?

Lisa Bashert: Well, I talked a little bit about my interest in Native culture. My degree in school was Anthropology and I studied modern Native culture so that I have a great interest there. And on my mother's side, my mother who didn't like to get dirty, her mother's mother, whom we called great mom, had a big farm in a little community called Porchtown, New Jersey.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh. Okay.

Lisa Bashert: And when I was a little child, we would also go up to that farm and they had animals, so they had like a pony, and they had a cow that had one blue eye and one brown eye, 00:44:00which I remember. And their commercial crop was asparagus. And so I do feel I tried to... I do feel connected to my food growing ancestors. And I did try to grow asparagus from my family's business, but I never had any luck.

Lisa Bashert: I just don't have enough sun in my own yard. And we don't usually do perennials at the community garden. So I do feel a connection to the fact that my ancestors grew in South Jersey, they came over... Well, let me say my spouse, for a Christmas present one time a few years ago, got me three hours with a genealogist. And the genealogist learned that my ancestors came to South Jersey in 1677, and they were Quakers running from persecution in Europe and came to South Jersey and they helped found the Bordentown Friends Meeting there. And they were...

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh, that's wonderful.

Lisa Bashert: They were farmers of course in the West Jersey area. So that's on the other side of the Delaware from Philadelphia. And so yeah I feel like that connection is there.

Omer Jean Winborn: Yeah. And you feel like that's the tradition that's worthy of being passed down.

Lisa Bashert: Absolutely.

Omer Jean Winborn: Yes. What do you think about values and traditions or lessons that you've learned from growing food and gardening?

Lisa Bashert: I told you about my thing with expired technology and another example of that is I have a food processor but the thing I really like is a grinder that clamps to the table that I got for a buck following the Normal Park yard sale. No one had bought it so it clamps to the table and then it has different cones that you know when you crank...

Omer Jean Winborn: Yes.

Lisa Bashert: It will shred your cheese or your carrots or those kinds of things and it helps my hands because it's…my hands are getting sore from doing different... just from aging. And so you know like... And my spouse also loves to do charcuterie, meaning she likes to smoke food, salt or smoke meat, salt meat. She makes bacon, she makes pancetta and all those different things and so we're always doing food crafts like that. I just love doing that kind of stuff and then also all the other kinds of crafts like darning socks and quilting and sewing things. I have a treadle sewing machine with you know you pump with your foot.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh that's wonderful.

Lisa Bashert: And so I mean my kids and grandkids are always around me doing stuff like that.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh that's wonderful.

Lisa Bashert: And I think yeah, 00:48:00it's good to appreciate what has come before and value it and if it still works you know what they say if it's not broke don't fix it.

Omer Jean Winborn: It's true. What would you like people who come after you either your direct descendants or even people who are just listening to this in the future. What would you like them to learn about this experience?

Lisa Bashert: About growing food?

Omer Jean Winborn: Yes about growing food.

Lisa Bashert: Well I think you should try it. It's very... There's a little joke people make that gardening is like therapy but you get tomatoes at the end.

[laughter]

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh I've not heard that. That's wonderful.

Lisa Bashert: Well I think it's really true.

Omer Jean Winborn: Yes.

Lisa Bashert: I mean I feel like gardening fixes what ails you emotionally and I love trying new things. So around my house I have a permaculture inspired garden, meaning, like the Three Sisters garden, permaculture gardens have guilds, meaning you plant things together because they're mutually beneficial. And so I like trying new things like that. I mean it's really an old thing not a new thing but I like rediscovering things like that and applying them and trying them out. Like I just planted... 00:50:00I have two apple trees and they're right next to the house and I'm trimming off all the branches front and back and that process is called espalier and it's a way to grow a fruit tree in a very small space.

Lisa Bashert: I have a tiny little yard. And so I love trying things like that. It's difficult because the apple tree does not want to grow that way and there's a lot of pruning involved and I always find pruning kind of anxiety producing. I feel really mean going up to an apple and saying I'm gonna, gonna cut your branch off now. [chuckle] But I think trying new things and trying different ways of interacting with the earth and the plants and also the birds and the bees and I was a beekeeper for a dozen years and that was a really learning experience and so I guess I'm all about learning things and rediscovering things and I think that people should try it.

Omer Jean Winborn: Yes. Is there anything that you would like to say to people who might be listening to this - anything else that you would like to say. Not only the future but people now that are listening. What would you like to say to them?

Lisa Bashert: I would like to say dig up your lawn.

[laughter]

Lisa Bashert: Lawns are evil. They just they have nothing for any creatures that want to live. You know if you grow even a bunch of Zinnias that will feed butterflies and that will feed bees and also don't rake your leaves. Just dig up the lawn and put flowers 00:52:00or thyme or other kinds of herbs and things and it'll be so much better for you and it'd be better for your environment and if you grow echinacea you get to come out in the fall and you get to see all the beautiful goldfinches flying away from the echinacea 'cause you've disturbed them and it's beautiful and I would also say learn the other creatures that you're sharing the Earth with. I mean learn what their names are and that's my advice is that it's a beautiful way to live to know who your neighbors are including humans and the animals and bees and plants.

Omer Jean Winborn: Oh that's wonderful. Now is there anything that we didn't cover that you'd like to talk about.

Lisa Bashert: I don't think so. I mean that was a very thorough series of questions yeah.

Omer Jean Winborn: Well I thank you so much for participating. Thank you.

Lisa Bashert: Thank you. It was a great pleasure and you're welcome.