Garden Lady: How 20 Years of Showing Up Earned a Professor a Place in Her Community with Tracy Ore
Episode notes
Takeaways
- Big ideas can take years, so keep saying them out loud. Tracy Ore talked about creating a tomato unique to St. Cloud State from 2010 until a botanist arrived in 2022 and said it was easy, and now students have made more than 2,000 crosses.
- A garden with no fences, no fees, and no application can work. After 20 years, Tracy has seen people contribute well beyond what they take, the opposite of the tragedy of the commons.
- Community projects need a succession plan. Tracy is raising money to hire an executive director who can shadow her and carry the garden's core principles forward, so the work lasts beyond any one person.
Summary of the episode
In Part 2 of this conversation on Ice Cream Social, host David Boyer and Tracy Ore, professor of sociology and director of the community garden at St. Cloud State University, dig into the Husky tomato. The name honors the university mascot, though Tracy admits a different husky tomato already exists, so a tweak like "husky red and black tomato" may be coming. Tracy had pitched the idea of a tomato unique to campus since 2010, until Dr. Angela McDonnell, a botanist and biology professor who had just been cross-pollinating eggplants, arrived in 2022 and told her it was easy. Students and faculty started with striped and black tomato varieties and have now completed more than 2,000 crosses across four generations, with students presenting their work at conferences. The goal is a flavorful, attractive, consistent black and red tomato about the size of a cocktail tomato. This summer they planted seven seed sets, labeled them in secret, and Tracy and Dr. McDonnell each independently identified two seed sets they wanted. One selection is now growing in the greenhouse, and its very dark purple seedlings showed off a plant science concept called hybrid vigor.
Tracy describes the flavor as sweeter and deeper than most tomatoes, great on a sandwich, and David is already dreaming of a tomato ice cream. He mentions that Crew has recently been experimenting with tomato ice cream of their own. The conversation then tours the rest of the garden: 20 varieties of okra, 30 varieties of eggplant, nearly 100 varieties of hot peppers, bitter melon, snake gourd, 12 kinds of basil, shiso, lemongrass, lemon balm, lemon verbena, and house-made tea blends. Tracy grows a wide diversity of plants so that no matter who walks in, they see something familiar, and she delivers herbs regularly to local businesses.
Looking back on 20-plus years, Tracy shares a Grace Lee Boggs line from her email footer about staying in one place being the most radical thing she ever did. Staying put has given her a foundation and a community that shows up when things get hard. She shares a funny story about being greeted as "Garden lady" by the food sample guy at Costco, and says she feels she has earned a respectable place in the community and has the best job in the world.
The episode wraps up with the future. David is eager to build serious ice cream collaborations with the garden, following the strawberry basil flavor Jupiter Moon made last year. Tracy shares her vision for The Commons, a house between the gardens that would become a food education and food preservation center with a cafe run by a tech college culinary arts program, plus a professional kitchen for community gatherings and ice cream collaborations. She is giving herself four years to raise money for an executive director, and has dreams of hiring a chief jam officer. Part 3 arrives next week.