We are excitedly getting ready for the gardening season here at Pearson: fixing up accessible table top garden boxes, repairing the irrigation systems, and topping up the soil with fresh black compost. At the end of March, folks at Pearson started seeds indoors to be transplanted outside once the weather warms. Baby tomatoes were on almost everyone’s list! For the people who live at George Pearson, gardening was mostly a nostalgic thing of the past…until 2 years ago. An energetic community group proposed Farmers on 57th — a community garden plus a productive farm on Pearson land — and with persistence and support from outside groups, in 2008 obtained approval and got funding in place. Pearson is unique in its vast lawns and natural setting — about 19 acres of the property is landscaped. The building actually takes up a minor section of the land! Some of the trees and bushes here have been thriving since 1952, when Pearson Hospital was originally built to care for the influx of tuberculosis patients following World War II. O, if the plants could speak, the stories they would tell! But maybe they are telling us stories, if we listen closely enough…