Providence Group Finds Fertile Ground

for a Handcrafted Greenhouse

By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI staff

PROVIDENCE — For 20 years, Michael Giroux didn’t appreciate the deliciousness of kale. Truth be told, he didn’t know the edible plant with crinkled leaves even existed.

Now, the 25-year-old Montana native is building a greenhouse on the city’s West Side to grow the vegetable. Actually, the near-completed greenhouse that sits in the back, left corner of the Fertile Underground Communal Garden on Pearl Street isn’t being built for the sole purpose of growing kale, but it did provide some motivation.

“There’s a robust quality to kale I didn’t know about,” Giroux said. “Until that summer, I never realized vegetables could taste that good or that delicious. It was an unreal experience.”

It was summer 2004 that Giroux was introduced to the freshness, crispness and tastiness of local produce. He had joined the Southside Community Land Trust’s community-supported agriculture (CSA) program at Urban Edge Farm in Cranston.

The Fox Point resident has been addicted to local produce ever since.

“I had never eaten anything like that,” Giroux said. “It was real local food, not that stuff that is processed, packaged and shipped industrially. That’s when I started drawing a line between the two.”

That line will be extended this spring to the community garden on Pearl Street, where Giroux and the other 15 or so members of the Fertile Underground will have a greenhouse to accompany their outdoor plots.

The greenhouse will be used to grow lettuce, spinach and other salad greens, herbs, such as mugwort and mullein, and flowers. It also will used to get an early jump on the frost, adding three to six weeks to the garden’s growing season.

Greenhouse construction begin last October, after Giroux returned from a stay at the Mountain Homestead, a developing, off-grid, permaculture community on 365 acres of temperate rainforest in Coquille, Ore. While there, in exchange for his carpentry skills, the soon-to-be father — he and Nina Maxwell are expecting their first child in April — learned about ecological forest management based on resident stewardship.

When he returned to Providence, Giroux soon went to work building the community garden’s first greenhouse. It was built using mostly recycled materials, such as old storm windows destined for the landfill, bricks that littered the site and reclaimed boards decorated with nails.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Giroux and fellow local resident Trev Hedge visited the Connecticut woods carrying a chainsaw to harvest the timber of downed and dead trees for the greenhouse project.

So far, the nearly completed greenhouse has cost $75 to build. That money was used to buy four four-by-four posts, a few boxes of screws and some drill bits.

“We’ve put an emphasis on building with recyclable materials and slightly broken stuff,” Giroux said.

The greenhouse also will feature big gutters and two 60-gallon rain barrels, he said.

Fertile Underground members started the communal garden last May. It is part of the Southside Community Land Trust’s network of community gardens. The Fertile Underground pays a local business owner $200 a month for the space — it covers the property tax on the land. The organization has approached Mayor David Cicilline about eliminating that tax.

“The mayor wants to put money into ‘green’ stuff,” Giroux said. “Maybe we should start with stop taking money out of green stuff. Waiving that tax would make a statement.”

The group wants to use its garden and greenhouse to help make Providence a healthier place to live. They want people with little to no gardening experience involved, working the land for shares.

“We want to be inviting to people,” Giroux said. “We want people lead energetic lifestyles. To do that, they need healthy foods.”

For more information about the greenhouse, visit carpentersforchrist.wordpress.com. Anyone interested in participating in this community garden should send an e-mail to sustainableri@freelists.org.

A River Runs Through It

Woonasquatucket’s revitalization improves quality of life in Olneyville

By FRANK CARINI/ecoRI staff

PROVIDENCE — One hundred and fifty shopping carts, 3 tons of tires, broken glass and discarded needles have way of ruining a public park.

In fact, environmental conditions along and in the long-polluted Woonasquatucket River helped turn the Olneyville section of Providence into one of the city’s most impoverished and distressed neighborhoods.

As textile and machine-tool manufacturers closed and jobs disappeared, the river changed from a valued industrial asset to a neglected natural resource that become “dirty” and “disgusting.” In the Olneyville area, for example, the river and its banks became a dumping ground for chemicals and debris.

“The Olneyville neighborhood was a neglected area of Providence,” said Alicia Lehrer, the executive director of the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council. “Its parks were used as drug hangouts and for prostitution.”

For years, harmful chemicals and pollutants, such as mercury, sulfuric acid, chromic acid, ammonium persulfate and copper salts, were dumped into the Woonasquatucket River.

“The water is still pretty polluted, but its getting better,” Lehrer said. “Industrial uses along the river, like the textile industry and the dyes it used, featured some horrible chemicals and heavy metals that are still in the sediment.”

The 19-mile river, which runs through Providence’s West Side, became so polluted that fish couldn’t survive in its waters, and recreational boaters had no interest in navigating around shopping carts, refrigerators and all the other debris that filled the waterway.

Swimming and fishing in the filthy water were no longer appealing activities.

It wasn’t until the early 1990s that people started caring about the forgotten river — in fact, the downtown Providence section of the waterway had been paved over — and the land resources surrounding the Woonasquatucket, Lehrer said.

Today, thanks to the dogged efforts of people such as Fred Lippitt, Jane Sherman, Jenny Pereira, Lisa Aurecchia, Lehrer and many others, there are again fish in the now-less-polluted waters and neighborhood children don’t have to climb over piles of illegally dumped debris to play along the river, which was once lined by abandoned, and contaminated, industrial sites and overgrown riverbanks filled with trash.

Those responsible for organizing the many river cleanups and community projects believe the revitalization of the Woonasquatucket watershed and the sight of fish again in the river have deterred some from dumping debris in the area and motivated others to once again use the waterway for recreation purposes.

A public disgrace
The Woonasquatucket River runs through the southern part of the triangular-shaped Olneyville neighborhood, which is bordered by Atwells Avenue to the north, Route 6 to the south and Route 10 to the east, and Donigian Park exemplified what the area had become.

“Donigian Park was a mess. It was broken glass, needles just …,” says Aurecchia, the watershed council’s program director, in a well-produced video that can be found on the organization’s Web site. She finishes the quote with a disgusted wave of her left hand, signifying the park’s once-vast untidiness.

After years of severe neglect and little constructive use, Donigian Park was renovated in the late 1990s as part of the Woonasquatucket River Greenway Project, which also included restoring other Olneyville greenways, such as Riverside Park and Merino Park.

The effort required a lot of commitment, tons of work and a substantial amount of money, all of which was supplied by volunteers, area businesses and organizations and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

“We had one of our first cleanups along the river in (Donigian) Park,” says Sherman in the 10-minute video that was produced last fall, “and we pulled out 150 shopping carts and three tons of tires.”

To celebrate the restoration of the parks, improved access to the river and better water quality, a festival was held on a street in Olneyville Square several years ago. The improvements caught some neighborhood residents by surprise.

“The day before the festival we went along the river and we cut down all the knotweed, and Paddle Providence arrived with (its) canoes,” says Sherman, the founder of the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council and a current board member. “People from the neighborhood came to the festival and they saw the canoes and they looked at us and said, ‘Where did you get the river?’”

A neighborhood reborn
A decade since the aforementioned greenway project was started, the green space surrounding the river, which once played a prominent role in the Industrial Revolution, and its waters have been largely restored.

A mere three years ago, Riverside Park on Aleppo Street, a former industrial site contaminated by petroleum waste, was nothing but a “pile of rubble.” Today, the park is home to a community garden, playground and two canoe launches.

Programs have been developed for family uses at all the parks. A bike path has been built that connects the various greenways in the area. Neighborhood teenagers have been taught how to protect the river and help maintain the parks, and as part of the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council’s “River Rangers” program, some of these same teens are now teaching what they’ve learned to students at the Perry Middle School on Hartford Avenue.

For all the successes the Olneyville neighborhood and the Woonasquatucket River watershed have experienced, though, there is still plenty of work to be done, including restoring fish runs.

Fish once were plentiful in the Woonasquatucket River, but contamination from the many mills that long ago powered Providence’s economy destroyed their habit. The dams that ran these mills clogged the river and blocked access to spawning grounds.

“There’s enough spawning habitat for 40,000 migratory fish, plus American eel,” Lehrer said.

The problem was getting them access to the area. That work began in earnest in the early 2000s and continues today.

Just last week, a splintered section of the remaining Dyerville Dam, a 150-year-old, timber-crib dam, was yanked out to allow alewife, blueback herring and shad to pass that stretch of the Woonasquatucket River.

In fact, three of the first five dams on the lower Woonasquatucket River have been bypassed to allow migratory fish to pass.

The first fish ladder was installed in 2007 at the Rising Sun Dam, and the first fish run using that ladder happened in the spring of 2008, after some 600 fish, mostly alewife, were released from one of the Riverside Park canoe launches down the river from the dam.

The construction of a fish ladder at Riverside Park followed soon there after.

By the end of next year, Lehrer said she expects a partial breach of the Paragon Dam, which is visible from the Delaine Street Bridge, to be finished and a fish ladder at Manton Dam, which is less than a mile up the river from the Dyerville Dam, to be built.

When the rest of this work is completed, a vital link between Narragansett Bay and the Woonasquatucket River watershed will be restored, providing migratory fish a clear path to the Johnston border and all the spawning grounds in between.

“For more than 140 years there have been no fish runs on this river,” Lehrer said. “The fish that were here were probably lost because they weren’t programmed to come back here. The kids of the fish we released last year should be programmed to return.”