Mouchotte potager et compost
The kids harvest the tomatoes and Mouchotte throws a party
Pieter is the gardener in our family. He’s the one with the green thumb, both for indoor and outdoor plants. Frankly, the only thing I enjoyed about living in Davis, CA, when our daughter was very small, was gathering the tomatoes, basil, and zucchini that flourished in the hot weather there. Pieter’s few attempts at planting tomatoes in San Francisco — even the variety called “Fog Belt” — were not very successful; the tomatoes never truly ripened and the skin was like leather. Never one to give up, in early Spring, 2023, shortly before we moved to Paris, Pieter built a geodesic dome in our backyard in which he placed pots of basil and tomato seedlings. They thrived and the other occupants of our building enjoyed the harvest.
We arrived in Paris in early June and it was hot. Nobody has air conditioning, the sun didn’t set until after 10pm, and the outdoor seating at neighborhood cafes was packed until the early hours as the air slowly, gradually cooled down. One evening as it was getting dark, we decided to wander around our “backyard” — the Jardin Atlantique — but the gates were already locked, so instead we took a walk on the terrasse on the front side of our building (see blog post: L’Immeuble Mouchotte.) Halfway along the terrace, we ran into a neighbor carrying gardening tools. She pointed to a gate in a fence we hadn’t noticed before, behind which were large wooden bins and a few small plants, and told us about the potager communautaire or community vegetable garden.
A group of Mouchotte residents had started composting a few years earlier, but not until 2023 did they receive permission from the building’s Board to start a potager, which is why they were only now starting to plant. Were we interested? Pieter certainly was, and this was also a great opportunity for us to meet the neighbors and for him to improve his French. That very weekend, the group was planning a get-together to build planter boxes and plant tomatoes, herbs, and lots more.
Throughout the summer, there was a rotating schedule of who would water when. The collective also organized get-togethers to plant, weed, and shovel the compost from one bin to the next. By the time the compost is transferred to the final bin, it has transformed into a gorgeous black mulch, which is then spread among the planter boxes. About 100 apartments participate in separating their organic material and contributing it to the potager, so the first compost bin fills up very quickly.
As you can see from the bare trees and the bundled up gardeners, the above photo was taken in the winter. A few months earlier, although the zucchini and eggplant got devoured by bugs, the tomatoes were thriving, so the collective decided to organize a September tomato harvest. There are loads of families living in Mouchotte with children of all ages, and who better to pick the tomatoes than the kids.
The harvest morphed into a full-blown Mouchotte party. In the afternoon, there was face painting for the kids and an enormous garage sale — well, actually a “terrace sale” — of their games and toys. After a lull of a few hours, the tables used for the sale of the kids’ stuff were repurposed for the adults’ apéro, to which everyone contributed something to snack on or drink, plus this was a great way to distribute the tomatoes. By 7:30pm a line of tables stretched nearly the length of the terrace, and residents were emerging from their apartments bearing something to contribute to the potluck. We found a couple of available chairs at one end of a table and sat down to dinner. Many people living in Mouchotte have been there for years or decades, and some are second generation. We met two women in their 30s who’d grown up together in Mouchotte and gone to the same schools from the age of 6. One of them has moved a couple of blocks away, but the other still lives in Mouchotte, now with her own partner and children.
With so many residents, some of them are bound to be musicians. And musicians know other musicians. A rotation of guitarists, keyboard players, bassists, percussionists, and singers entertained for hours.
By 11pm, we were starting to fade, but the party was still going strong. There was already talk about make this a semi-annual event.
What a lovely way to create a community within a community! The potluck dinner sounds delightful.