In Dennis Lisenby’s Charlotte garden, you turn left for tomatoes, go straight for okra, raise your hand for cucumbers and Malabar spinach.
Whatever the weather, feet stay dry on cement walkways. You never step on the beds where plants rise vigorously in soil Dennis revved up with manure.
And though the garden contains the usual palette of Piedmont summer vegetables, such as tomatoes, squash, green beans, cucumbers, sweet and hot peppers, the design makes it unique.
You see, Dennis doesn’t walk through his garden. He rolls through it in his wheelchair, bending to pull a weed, reaching to pick a tomato or pausing to admire his creation as water spouts gently from the sprinkler.
A neuromuscular disorder requires him to use a wheelchair, but that hasn’t kept the 47-year-old computer consultant at Duke Energy from making and maintaining his garden.
“I’ve been a gardener forever,” he says. ” My earliest memory of gardening is a golden autumn day, and everything was brown. The okra was brown and dry and with the remaining pods rattling like rattlers.
“And I took my wooden sword out into the garden and slew all the okra. I was 4 or 5, and I remember looking forward to that every year.”
Dennis, who grew up in Concord and Charlotte, no longer slays okra with a sword. Instead he cultivates it.
He has always grown stuff, even after he began using a wheelchair, but last summer he got serious about organizing a garden that would truly meet his needs for productive vegetables and wheelchair accessibility.
“A lot of people are aware of the concept of square-foot gardening, and this I guess is sort of a variation on that,” he says. “You strive for having small areas that are accessible from all directions, so you can reach all of your soil and all of your plants.
“And since I had to go to the expense of concrete sidewalks, verticality was important. You get many, many more crops in a vertical space.
“I’m going to hopefully have a good harvest of cantaloupes this year, and I’ve had an incredible number of cucumbers, more than I have outlets to give them away, almost.”
At the start, he picked a sunny space, about 32 feet by 15 feet, behind his utility building and the large fig tree that sort of makes the doorway into the garden.
“On the space, I superimposed the sidewalks that would make as much of this space accessible as possible.”
One long sidewalk leads through the garden; four more branch off at right angles between the beds, which are 5 by 10 feet. The width proved a tad wide. Four feet, he now thinks, would make a better width.
“I have more surface area of dirt than I could really reach from the pavement I installed. So I had a lot of plywood left over from the reroofing of the house and pressed that into emergency service as auxiliary walkways.”
He placed the plywood boards on the soil adjacent to the sidewalk and part of the circumference of the garden to reach the plants better.
Beds around the edge of the garden are 3 feet wide.
“They’re quite reachable,” he says. “Three feet may not sound like a lot of soil, but with vertical growing and succession planting, you can get a lot of vegetables in a bed 3 feet wide.”
Dennis made the garden vertical by building frames of wire set in the beds and tilted slightly. He developed another form of trellis by looping twine at various points over a cable 6-1/2 feet high that runs around the perimeter of the garden.
“Twine is real cheap. All you have to do is tie a few knots. I tie a weight to it, fling it over the cable and it’s ready.”
He built the framed trellises with 2-by-2-inch wood, drywall screws and wire mesh. Though the wire, which has 4-by-2-inch mesh, works well, Dennis thinks 4-by-4 would make it easier to harvest cucumbers.
The vertical garden proved workable, even though some of it is too tall for Dennis.
“I invite the neighbors to pick when things get out of my reach,” he says.
The garden’s design settled, he set to work on the soil.
“Soil preparation is everything. The soil was typical clay with a thin layer of what passes for topsoil in these parts.”
He added organic matter, including about three and a half tons of dairy cow manure to improve it. For that work, like many of us, he hired a professional shoveler.
“The trick is, when you don’t walk on the soil and it is heavily amended with organic material, it doesn’t compact. It stays fluffy,” he says.
So he is able to lean over, trowel in hand, and set the plants or sow the seeds.
For weed control, he uses landscape cloth under wood chips. “That works pretty well,” he says. If something pops up around the edges, he can pull it out easily from the soft soil. “There’s no back-breaking weeding. You just pull those morning glories out when they pop up.”
“I go out there in the evening after I’ve harvested what I have to harvest and pinched the suckers off the tomatoes. I just like to sit there a while and commune with my garden.”
“This keeps me active, too,” Dennis says. “This is the hardest labor I do. I’m working for lazy gardening, no-work gardening. But I’m still tooling around, recycling bins of wood chips and manure, building stuff, sawing, moving stuff around.
“Gardening and brewing are my chief hobbies. I brew my own beer. I’m planning on putting some hops in next spring.”
Does he think they’ll grow here?
“Absolutely.”
