Mrs. Vera Watson is standing in her garden, "Neighbor's Way Garden." She is smiling and holding a shovel with one hand. — Mrs. Vera Watson

A Story too Common

It took two years, starting when she made her first call to Neighborspace, for Vera Watson to have the custodian cap on the hydrant outside Neighbor’s Way Garden, her Austin flower and vegetable garden, removed. The magnetic metal cap prevents opening with the standard hydrant or pigtail adjustable key. Why caps are placed on hydrants across the city is unclear. Often, “misuse” is the given reason by the Department of Water Management. In almost all cases, the grower seeking to start the often years long process for removal is not the reason the cap is placed on the hydrant in the first place, but they are the ones financially responsible for the removal.

Advocates for Urban Agriculture (AUA) has supported Mrs. Vera with technical assistance to navigate the city’s processes for custodian cap removal, and permitting process for a Hydrant Use Permit (HUP). Through the water access program, AUA has provided the necessary equipment for hydrant access, funding to support cap removal, and rain barrels to help in the meantime. Certification of backflow devices for all seeking HUPs has also been provided through a partnership with Neighborspace.

As required by the Department of Water Management (DWM), partially completing an application for an HUP for use by farms and gardens is the first step in the process. This gets the applicant and hydrant of interest in the City’s system. Next, the DWM plumbing inspectors review the hydrant for any history of misuse, and, if the City is satisfied, the applicant can pay for the removal. As of 2024, $1,055.00 (up from $950.00 in 2023) is the fee required to have a custodian cap removed.

In May 2024, Mrs. Vera’s cap removal was approved, and the fee was paid at the Office of the City Clerk. In July, the cap was removed. Mrs. Vera’s next steps were to complete the application for the HUP. By that time, it was too cost prohibitive and late in the year to pay the city’s annual rate for a permit and only be able to use the hydrant until October 31 when HUPs across the city expire due to the likelihood of freezing temperatures.

So, a third calendar year passes and Neighbor’s Way Garden still doesn’t have access to water.

Neighbor’s Way Garden

Before the lot was Neighbor’s Way Garden, it was a parking lot for the owner’s rusting cars. “He had cars out here, and he was angry that we got together and had the city move them, because there were so many rats.”

The landowner passed away, and the bank re-established control of the lot, but it remained vacant.

Mrs. Vera, her grandson, neighbors, landscaper friends, and her block club took care of the lot, remediating the soil with wood chips, cutting the grass, removing unwanted plants, and hardscaping the borders of soon-to-be beds with chunks of sidewalk. The bank, impressed with their work, gifted her block club the $250.00 a month they would have paid landscapers. After fifteen years, the bank sold the lot to Mrs Vera for $6,000.00 in 2020.

During the summers, Mrs. Vera’s grandson worked alongside her, doing all the odd jobs required to turn a vacant lot into a garden. “He loved it over the summer. He would come here at 6:00 in the morning, and start working. He’d be through at 10:00, go home, take a shower, get his money, go and get him something to eat, and go home and take a nap, get dressed up, and at 4:00 come out and sit on the porch with me.”

Over the years many have been involved in Neighbor’s Way, but there is not an organization–formal or informal– taking care of the garden.

“I’m just at the mercy of people helping me now.”

Nor is there an organization financially backing the garden.

“It’s been basically me taking my lunch money—whatever I could—to get it this far.”

Through thrift, sweat, and asking for help, Mrs. Vera’s garden has outgrown the lot where it started. It has traveled under the fences on three sides, into a neighbors’ yards, and onto the tree lawns nearly to the end of the block. Her garden features canna lilies, zinnias, day lilies, and, recently, vegetables Mrs. Vera gives away to her neighbors. Pink and red hibiscus, her most prized and prolific flower, is planted in nearly all parts of her garden, and her adjacent neighbors’ gardens. Every fall she buries them in wood chips she gets donated by tree cutters, and every spring she digs them, splits them, and the garden grows her neighbor’s way.

This is Neighbor's Way Garden in 2022, it is beautiful and green with flowers, shrubs, trees and landscaped with vegetable gardens as well. — Neighbor’s Way Garden, September 2022

Early Years

Mrs Vera grew up going to a 4-H program, and on her family farm working truck patches of beans, peas, and okra in Mississippi. Her father, a farmer and carpenter, introduced her to gardening with a small plot and quarter.

“When I was 14, my dad built me a garden in the front yard, and I [...] I ordered seeds[.] You could get five packs of seeds for a quarter. So I taped a quarter to a piece of paper and put it in an envelope.”

She moved to Chicago in 1967 with her husband.

“And when I got married and left home at 19 years of age, the four o'clocks were still blooming.”

She has spent all 57 years in three residences in Austin. She has always had flowers and a garden.

“I’m from the south, and my grandfather taught me that people live in places, and people stay in places,” she says.

She believes gardening creates community–connection and a sense of place. For Mrs. Vera, a garden is both a means to an end and an end in itself.

“A little old lady that lived across the street there, she would get up every morning and open those blinds right there. She had cancer, and it just did her heart good to look out here, and see it was just paper and grass, and how pretty the flowers was. And she died and she always tell me [...]: that’s what what encouraged [her] to keep going.”

And it keeps Mrs. Vera going as well.

“People who know me know I love beautiful things. So you can’t just give me anything. Give me the beauty. I’ll take a flower over a dollar.”

Today

In August, Chicago “had an average temperature of 83.7 degrees, which is 1.2 degrees above normal”, and received 2.60” of rainfall, 1.65” fewer than average for August according to NOAA. Had it not been for Mrs. Vera’s practice of heaping wood chips around the base of her plants, many of the long established plants would have been severely stressed at best by the weather.

An increasingly hot and unpredictable climate, a slow moving process for getting growers the access to water their farmers and gardens need, and a lack of policy to address these concerns and ease the process for water access at nearly every level of government means a difficult road for the senior gardener. But she is unmoved.

“If you could do it in the dust of Mississippi, you can do it anywhere.”

Presently, Mrs. Vera has plans to start the application process (which must be completed annually) for an HUP in January, so she has all the necessary materials in place for the permit which can be issued as early as April 1.

Advocates for Urban Agriculture supports emerging and established growers with technical assistance, mentorship programs, and the annual Capacity Building Grant. For more information on programs, contact us at outreach@auachicago.org.