as small as a world and as large as alone

2:00pm June 21, 2014

craftastrophies:

moniquill:

wifigirl2080:

moniquill:

project-raw:

Enough said!

This ‘YOU CAN DO IT!’ shit needs to be -BACKED-.

I am all for the encouragement of urban gardening, but pretty pictures and platitudes aren’t enough. You need to be out there handing out dirt and seeds and containers, you need to be getting out there and building wheelchair-accessible raised community gardens and building seed libraries and showing people how to hang tomato plants off fire escapes and commandeer city land - and even THEN you don’t say ‘YOU CAN DO IT!’ you say ‘Hey, this is how to do it, if you want in.’

Telling people they can do it isn’t doing shit if you’re not actually showing them how and helping to make it possible.

Growing food instead of lawns is good, but can we PLEASE work on doing things to make it possible?

Maybe give people instructions on how to work with an/or fight their home owner’s association, how to appeal to a landlord, how to address local ordinances, and how to grow stealth food crops as ornamental plants in areas where food gardening is banned. Seriously, they will come bulldoze your shit and then bill you for it.

We need more posts instructing people how to guerrilla garden and found community gardens, and fewer posts saying ‘Grow food, not lawns!’

(Also we need to remember that some people will never be able to invest the money, time, and effort both physical and mental that it takes to have a garden, because they have personal care needs/care of others responsibilities/jobs/illnesses/physical disabilities/other shit to do/do not give a dull fuck about gardening and are perfectly happy with a patch of grass or even astroturf AND THAT IS OK TOO.)

Ok not deter anyone from doing this but just an observation I have about home gardens and shit:

To me it’s funny seeing white ppl with these gardens in their yards, like ur ppl literally destroyed whole ecosystems and forests, killed families of color and destroyed cultures, put them in jails and cities with little to no access to the resources that would enable them to have these plots of land, let alone a house to grow it in, have them situated in food deserts and then u kick them out of wherever they were staying in these under served urban areas, refurbish and buy the homes and set up these little gardens so that u can have fresh kale for ur breakfast smoothies.

Just rlly funny.

^Also 100000000% important commentary. The reason you folks HAVE to fight your HOA and the city to be allowed to grow food instead of lawns is because of -entirely racist- anti-gardening laws that are meant to keep out poor people, poc, immigrants, etc.

On the way out to my suburb you can track the gentrification by vegetable gardens. Close to the city there are manicured gardens obviously tended by employed gardeners, and then sometimes gardens with kale in the front yard, and espaliered fruit trees protected by bird noise machines, tended by gardeners who use $50 knee pads and $100 ‘heirloom watering cans’.

Then for a while the front yards have lawns with iceberg roses in them.

Then for a while they have lawns or maybe just dirt. But the backyards are overflowing with things growing on trellises fashioned from packing crates and leftover wire. Gardens of immigrant families and working class people, that have been established and feeding whole families for decades.

And then the people in the fancy suburbs write articles saying things like ‘if you wander the outer suburbs, you will see lawn after lawn, with not a vegetable in site’. This is an actual sentence I read, written by a real person, about a suburb right near me that is PACKED FULL of established gardens tended by Italian nonnas and Vietnamese families and newly immigrated African people. Full disclosure, I am a white person from a working/middle class family, but you know when I ‘wander the outer suburbs’ I usually notice the way people have been growing things for DECADES in those houses, because they love it but also because they had to.

And when there aren’t gardens it’s usually because someone in the posh suburb bought that house, knocked it down and stuck in five rentals with dodgy thin walls and a teeny courtyard so yeah, I don’t want to hear how morally superior any white person (including me, definitely) feels because they grow vegetables. You want to grow vegetables instead of lawn then yeah that’s great but you don’t get to pretend like it’s an idea you just came up with that everyone else was too ‘unenlightened’ to do. The reason someone can act like it is a revelation to grow fancy lettuce in a pot is because they have always had the luxury of going to the shop and buying it instead, and not having to think too hard about how food works and how they are going to get some. 

I’m still weirded out by the idea that this is some sort of new idea?

My father grew up on a farm.  My mother grew up poor enough that they had to have a garden to supplement the times when her dad was out of work.  So when they grew up, they automatically had a food garden, because that’s just what you do.  Still do.  Our front yard was mostly just dirt and redwoods, our back yard was all these food crops (which we of course tended ourselves, who else would do it!?).  Plus chickens.  And some flowers.

And now this is supposed to be some sort of weird upper-middle-class Thing People Have Discovered?  It’s weird to me.

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