By Pamela Steinbach

It’s delightful living in Diane Dixon’s neighborhood. Walking the dog, I usually slow down as I pass her house so I can eavesdrop as she plays her oboe. She’s a musician with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, and her practice session greets me from an upstairs window as I arrive to interview her about her backyard — which holds another kind of delight.

I’m never happier than when I’m puttering and digging around in my backyard and fetching dirt and getting out there and watching what I plant grow.”

Diane grows abundant, healthy vegetables in beautiful raised beds, not only in her backyard but also at her “annex,” the Community Garden of the Fort Wayne Parks Department. Regularly hauling garbage cans filled with water to care for her plants there, she’s understandably excited that the Parks Department is considering bringing water utilities to the garden on Bluffton Road.

Diane grew up on a farm and took fresh food for granted, but it wasn’t until she was a city-dweller in her 50s that she realized that the best way to get access to sustainably grown, fresh and pesticide-free food was to grow it herself. Diane was confident she could make things grow, but she suspected there was more to it than what she’d picked up as a farm kid. So she interned for two summers at Lonestar Farm, learning organic farming techniques before training to become an organic inspector. Yet, she said she still doesn’t consider herself a good gardener; that would take more time with the best teacher: experience.

She puts Tony Flemming, Victoria Furguson and Dan Flowtow in the “good gardener” category, as they continue to teach her about pest management, natural systems and the key work of building up the organic content of soil. She also learns from Ephraim Smiley, who gardens with ease and confidence and is committed to teaching youth the pleasures of gardening.

Diane improves her small raised beds with compost and crop rotation, and, from the look of her garden, it seems to work. This winter, she’ll plant rye and vetch, so when she takes seedlings from her basement for spring planting, they will enjoy nitrogen-rich soil, and they won’t have to compete with weeds. She buys her seeds from catalogs ($40 gets her enough for spring and fall plantings, leaving some for use the next season).

I ask Diane if all this work is saving her money in her food budget. She explains that, while there are one-time expenses incurred in getting started — for lumber and topsoil, grow lights, flats and pots, “I suspect I do save money, because I’m not buying anything at the store in the summer. I buy organic and, if I couldn’t grow it, I would buy it wherever I can,” she said. That would include organic food trucked in from California, and transportation makes it expensive.

She makes a point of telling me what “expensive” means to her: “In our country, we have a ‘cheap’ mentality about food. We don’t realize that subsidized food production enables our low food prices. Cheap, mass-produced food is abundant, but the true costs are masked: tax dollars and the environmental costs that our children will pay. You have to think about the environmental costs of your food. That’s very important.”

She adds that locally grown food is gaining in popularity, inspired by the realization that most food, while cheap and plentiful now, may become more expensive as the looming oil crisis impacts supermarket goods (conventional pesticides, fertilizer, packaging and transportation are all oil-based). “For now,” Diane says, “we are far removed, locally, from the natural rhythms of the seasons and far removed from having a relationship with growers who make a living growing food. I want to patronize a local grower, and I’m willing to pay for that, because I know a local grower will have to charge a decent price in order to make a living. People lose sight of that.”

Being a musician as well as a gardener, Diane knows the importance of timing. Experience and her gardening mentors have taught her when to plant, feed and water what she grows. Proper timing has its rewards, too. For instance, Diane is able to open her little greenhouse early in the spring and harvest a salad, long before she’d be able to buy fresh greens locally. But what’s most fun is chatting with the friends she’s made through gardening. “Everyone has a story to tell. And it’s a new story every week,” she says.

Diane hopes that maybe in two more seasons she’ll have enough experience to consider herself a good gardener. Looking at her garden and tasting the greens she’s sent home with me, I’d say she’s closer than she thinks.