At the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary off Alt. 19 in Palm Harbor, a Burmese Python named Molly is coiled in a glass tank by the entrance. Otto, a 550-pound silverback gorilla, is in a caged enclosure across the way.
To Tina Tierney, Otto is a muse. Strumming on her guitar, she sings to him softly nearly every day. "I've made a deep connection with him already. He understands."
The nonprofit sanctuary has been closed to the public for years, but is still fully functioning through memberships ($150 for families for life) and private donations. There is no staff, just volunteers. Tierney is one of its most recent volunteers in its newest expansion — the organic gardening department. The fruits of her labors are now primarily directed at the animals, but she hopes eventually to build a self-sustaining community farm.
Tina began paying attention to organic labels several years ago when she felt a lump in her breast. It proved to be benign but pushed her to shift her vegetarian lifestyle into organic mode. It wasn't long before she discovered gardening and farming. With her father, she helped build a garden at the Homeless Emergency Project in Clearwater.
"If we planted the seeds from one watermelon, we could give everyone in Pinellas a watermelon to eat."
Tierney, an occupational therapist by trade, volunteers at the sanctuary in the mornings before work and on weekends. Though she's only been there for a month and a half, she's readied a small field for planting and built several raised gardens.
She's also come up with some innovative ideas for feeding the animals. One day she noticed tiny tomato plants growing underneath the cage of a monkey who was particularly fond of tomatoes; he'd been dropping the seeds on the ground. That led her to plant tomatoes and banana trees next to the cages of all the animals so they could pull fruit from the branches and feed themselves, as they would have done in the wild.
Tina's therapy clients are children. She and the kids build garden boxes together, which she's also been building at the primate sanctuary. "There's so much concrete everywhere. I'm really excited to educate the kids from the ground up. The adults will have to be re-taught." Raised planters are great for children, seniors and folks with disabilities, she says, because the height prevents them from having to bend and reach to the ground when working the garden for long periods of time.
The boxes also enable soil to be mixed with other materials; a volunteer from USF tested the soil at the sanctuary and found it to be sandy and lacking in nutrients. But Tina's not one to sit and wait. Despite the soil and the time of year, she's already laid down a few corn seeds and they've begun to poke through the earth.
Her current challenge is replacing toxic cleaners for the animals' cages with environmentally friendly cleansers that are USDA-approved. She thinks a hydrogen peroxide-based cleaner would be best for replacing the bleach that is currently being used.
Geese walk around the yard, but she warns me not too get too close. They're territorial. "This is their area." They demonstrate her point by pooping in front of us. "That's good! They're creating good dirt."
She's reading books to learn what to do to get rid of pests. Cornmeal and honey sprinkled onto plants kill cutworms — they suck up the sweet stuff, bloat up and keel. Robins also eat the worms. A woman of faith and optimism, Tierney says that she prayed for robins and the next day found an abundance of them in the garden chowing down. But bugs are also necessary, she adds. Home Depot sells ladybugs by bags of thousands. They eat aphids, nasty buggers that destroy crops. "Bugs are good, too. We need it all."
The dedicated sanctuary volunteers are not quite used to her new ways yet, but they're learning to put fruit and veggie peels in a compost pile instead of the garbage and to plant seeds at the garden station whenever there's a spare moment. Though the volunteers come for the animals, Tina is trying to recruit them into the garden as well.
"People of this community are really reaching out. That's why a garden is so important. Someday people can come in and harvest their own crops." She's already got the support of the community. Publix donates fruit and veggie peels. The America the Beautiful Fund, a national nonprofit that preserves the natural beauty of the country, sent her 200 packages of seeds. Thirty kids from a synagogue in need of volunteer hours started an herb garden using the donated seeds. Their parents laid rows in a back lot and planted more.
Tierney says she's in this life for service, and when she gets tired or frustrated by the state of the world, she'll do something positive. "It starts with me." Little steps can be taken to help heal the earth; she advises everyone to pop some seeds in their backyard, no matter how small, to see what will grow.
A dream she shares with her family is to start a community garden on every street called MLK. "Towns maintain landscaping. Why not gardens? Let's start planting in every area we see."
But for right now, she's focusing on her little piece of dirt.
For each Curiouser profile, I ask the subject to tell me whose life he or she is curious about; the answer determines the person I'll be talking to in the next installment. Tina told me she's curious about the life of a Buddhist monk. In the next Curiouser, I find out.
This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2007.