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NORFOLK — Spring is pushing through cool nights and breezy mornings. It feels like a slow rolling start to summer and warm weather throughout the city, but in the garden of Bill Wetmore and Brian Gilbert, plants are off to riotous beginnings.
Walking through his backyard on a Sunday in early May, Wetmore said the garden wasn’t as lush as it could be.
But the garden at Wetmore and Gilbert’s Ingleside home is anything but barren. The relatively compact space is transformed into what feels like a sprawling field by the variety of plants pushing up the soil, bringing fruit, flowers and all manner of flora.
For Wetmore and Gilbert, who have been together for 30 years, gardening is but one way they have planted roots in Norfolk. The couple also co-owns the salon Avalon Hair and Day Spa in Ocean View. When Wetmore is not at the salon, he’s in the garden.
“I’m out here every morning at 5:30 before I have to go to work,” he said. “Even if it’s just digging in the dirt, it’s that peace and quiet.”
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Wetmore, a Navy veteran who grew up on a farm outside Pittsburgh, always has maintained a garden. But during pandemic lockdowns, Wetmore and Gilbert expanded their growing area. They moved their fence to create a larger area in the backyard for vegetable patches and raised beds.
The garden is a practice in self-sufficiency and frugality. Wetmore believes the food he grows is more nutritious than any produce he’d find in a grocery store. He wants to leave the planet in better shape for the next generation, and to that end, everything is recycled in the garden. Natural fertilizers ripen in the compost heap, and Wetmore lets every plant bloom and go to seed. The flowers attract pollinators, and later, Wetmore collects the seeds to plant again later.
“We’ve tried to grow just about everything back here,” Wetmore said.
Squash and beans sprout in beds together, augmenting the soil and each others’ growth. Strawberry plants line a brick path, with the red berries that appear early in the spring peeking out from beneath scalloped leaves. Blackberries skirt the fence line, and, according to Wetmore, pop up at will in other places throughout the garden, and even into the neighbors’ yard.
Mint is constrained to a metal planter to prevent it from doing the same. There’s a fig tree in the back, a pomegranate tree in the front, and potatoes, carrots and collards in between.
These are only some of the plants that flourish there, and that’s not to mention the fauna.
Wetmore and Gilbert built a chicken coop while home during the pandemic. They keep six chickens, named Pepper, Rosie, Lily, Morticia, Tofu and Fricassee, who are pets, Wetmore emphasized — pets who produce about three dozen eggs a week.
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“Why don’t you lay eggs?” Wetmore asked Marisa, an old ginger cat curled in his arms. Wetmore said he didn’t want a cat, but Marisa more or less adopted them, and has been fitting herself into spaces in the garden ever since. (He posts a photo series on Facebook of Marisa, with the recurring caption “If I fits, I sits.”)
Weekend Scoop
The chickens, who have their own personalities and hierarchies, Wetmore said, are instrumental to the cycle of the garden. Wetmore supplements their diet with vegetable scraps from his cooking (from the garden) and bugs that are bad for the plants.
Other birds also eat the bugs. Wetmore and Gilbert are out in the garden often enough to identify them. Not just the species of bird, but the individuals themselves. Wetmore pointed to a pair of finches in a bird bath. Other recurring visitors are the pair of mockingbirds, the cardinals, the robins and the mourning doves.
Wetmore has visions of expanding the plants to the front yard — building a formal Georgian garden with symmetrical paths and populating it with native herbs and flowers.
“It kind of overtakes you, but I enjoy it,” Wetmore said.
In addition to soups, stews and enough food that their grocery bill is only $90 a month in the summer, Wetmore and Gilbert produce a rainbow of jams from their garden, which they share with a wide circle of friends and salon clients. The jam made from a cactus has a light sweetness when they make it from early-season fruit, Gilbert explained, and a bright flavor like a Jolly Rancher when it’s made from fruit later in the summer. One jar appeared close in hue to candy apple red, though it could be more accurately described as cactus jam pink.
“I’ve got the mindset of, I just better go on gardening,” Wetmore said. “Maybe I’ll live longer.”
Cianna Morales, 757-957-1304, cianna.morales@virginiamedia.com