Christy Hartung has the door to her home unlocked. Literally and figuratively.
“Come on in and thru. I’m in the backyard,” says the sign on her door.
She’s cleaning her backyard, where there’s a full-fledged garden along with some chickens, too.
Hartung recently launched a gardening club in east Tulsa as part of the Columbus Neighborhood Association, which offers resources to residents in the area near Dolores Huerta Elementary School.
The gardening club is one way she hopes to create a sense of community in her neighborhood. It’s open to anyone that wants to learn about gardening – even if they don’t live in east Tulsa. Hartung hosts the meetings on the second Saturdays of the month, with the next set for 11 a.m. May 9. Those interested in joining can reach out to Hartung at 918-951-7007.
To Hartung, the club is about more than learning how to grow fruits and vegetables. She recently stopped at a neighbor’s house when she noticed branches were hanging low. She went back to her house to grab some trimmers and returned to offer them assistance.
“I was offering to help him and he didn’t want my help, and not in a rude way, just like, ‘This is weird. Nobody’s ever asked to help me before,’” said said. “In general, I would really like to see more neighborliness happening in our neighborhood.”
Developing a passion
Growing up, Hartung was always around her parents who loved to garden.
But she didn’t really start gardening until she moved to east Tulsa almost 30 years ago. The property she owns only had a tree and a yucca plant when she bought it.
“I just kind of experimented,” she said. “I know I stuck a tomato plant in the ground that first year and it was the best tomatoes I did. I haven’t had good success with tomatoes ever since.”
She later enrolled in OSU’s Master Gardeners program, which trains volunteers on horticulture. It remains the bedrock of Hartung’s gardening knowledge.
She started with gardening beds because she didn’t want to mow a lot. Now, her garden has different vegetables, including peppers and berries, and she’s even creating greenhouses.
“You just get started small, and then just make sure you don’t go beyond your ability to handle it all, which I’ve done many times,” she said. “Even last year, I realized I’m planting and gardening like I have lots of people to feed and I don’t.”
‘A lifestyle change’
If the pandemic showed Hartung one thing, it’s that life can be disrupted easily. She wouldn’t call herself a survivalist, but she finds it important to know how to do things on her own. For her, that’s gardening and cooking.
Society has become too dependent on the market instead of being self-sufficient, she said. The gardening club is her way of empowering people to do things for themselves.
“First of all, it makes them feel good about themselves, but it also gives them the ability to think ‘Oh, maybe I can do that. Look I did this too,’” she said. “So, it starts the ball rolling as far as helping to figure out things.”
Creating a sense of community
Hartung’s gardening club is only five months in and an extension of the neighborhood association. The idea is personal for her, though.
Gardening is more than just the food that’s grown, she said. It’s the trees. The birds. The sense of connection to nature. She wants to share it all with her east Tulsa neighbors.
“It’s the contradiction of wanting to live in a society where everything’s close, but also wanting to get away from people and things,” Hartung said. “So, in a way, it’s creating a little haven in the midst of a city for me.”
This article was produced as part of a partnership between the Tulsa Flyer and La Semana, a Tulsa-based bilingual Spanish-English newspaper serving Latino communities in Oklahoma.
News decisions at the Tulsa Flyer are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
