Garden Mind: Saying goodbye to a treasured community gardener and friend

Published 10:13 am Tuesday, February 16, 2016

This past month we buried Ann Goldeen, a close friend and local community organizer, the spark behind the bi-weekly KMUN garden show, “Diggin’ the Dirt.” Ann was a practicing chiropractor; she was also a singer and an overall well-rounded woman who died too young, at the age of 63.

I met Ann 19 years ago when we both enrolled in a Master Gardener training course, held in Seaside. It was a rare evening program, with occasional Saturday field trips, and it held an amazing group of people who are my friends to this day. For me, the training was overkill, me with eighteen years of work experience in the horticulture field. But I took the course to make new friends; I was a returning transplant, shell-shocked after a divorce, and instinctively I sought solace through my green thumb. It was a fruitful path.

A big part of the Extension master gardener training is the community payback project for the hours students receive in the science-based Extension curriculum. It was Ann Goldeen who came up with the idea for a radio program to air on KMUN. The show would air weekly, a live 30-minute spot, as the joint project for our cohort. Ann, already a board member on KMUN, agreed to engineer the show with the support of a handful of regular hosts. But the station wanted a backup engineer in case Ann got called away. The project spoke directly to me, with my love of all things about the garden, and it took me directly to my desire to program (DJ) and smack to my fear of all the electronics around being an on-air host. (Above all I feared “dead air.”) I became a DJ in 1997, and will be yoked forever to the early days of Diggin’ the Dirt.

Sometime during that long-ago spring of 1997 the show got fleshed out, the name decided, and Diggin’ the Dirt went live. It was quite early when I previewed a new CD from the Brownsmead Flats, and chose “The Sheet-rocker’s Waltz” for our theme song. Ann set the pace of the show, from the time we’d meet in the foyer at the Tillicum House, to the moments we went off-air. Every show, just before going live, Ann asked me to select something for the break, to air about 15 minutes in, when we’d shut off the mics and discuss any calls or questions that came up in the first half of the show. My eclectic selections were in high contrast to Ann’s classical tastes. That was our pattern all those early years when Ann, and Betsy Ayres of Cannon Beach, and I were the three show hosts.

But the shows also were a time for Ann to relax some, and she was a master at the impromptu mix. I’d try to encircle us with a topic sheet each show, but we often laughed our way far afield. With Betsy it could include the antics of gardening with elk visitors; with Ann it may be the challenges of gardening on a slope. Together, us three had decades of local horticultural experience and boy did we riff. Never a total free-for-all, we always had some idea where we were going because Ann had to publish a schedule in the KMUN program guide. We had much joy in the company of each other, imagining our friends in radio-land, sharing garden stories, tips, and new finds.

Ann was the spoke and the hub of that radio show, and for nineteen years she created the space where the Lower Columbia KMUN community could count on a regular course of local garden tips, events, personalities. At some juncture, Ann expanded her time slot, and with husband Dr. Barry Sears created another much-loved program, To Your Health. The two programs alternated every Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. for many years. The shows will continue under the hosting of Teresa Retzlaff, a CSA farmer out of Nehalem, Ore., and Dr. Allie Evans, a practicing naturopath from Astoria.

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In the “Stay Tuned” department:

Our last column, titled “New Gardener wants to eat. Now What?,” presented us with the case of someone with a new garden plot, in a similar climate to ours. In the past week I also got wind of another gardener, this one a bit more practiced, with a somewhat bigger plot, hers is 140 square feet, about 11×13 feet. His plot, at 4 x 8 is 32 square feet, and both are quite small by most standards, but still offer far bigger yields, potentially, than do many container-only gardens. Let’s take these two examples and explore what you can do with small plots.

Let’s go with what we have, which is our mantra for getting started, and was also a regular caveat from the KMUN Diggin’ the Dirt program. Next time we’ll compare ideas on what we want to do against the recommendations of experts, and see where that leads us.

Please join me again over the next several months, through the cold days of incubation and planning of winter.

My next column will explore the many ways you can fill you pantry and belly on a small plot. Please stay tuned.