Guerilla Gardening

Tonight I committed my first act of guerilla gardening. I waited until it was dark, as I don't know what anyone would say if they caught you planting vegetables in their garden. I chose a space in front of an apartment building near my house- I noticed that they water it every night and it gets lots of sunlight.

I had about 14 plants- cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes- just a little bigger than seedlings. A friend of mine had too many left over from his garden tower project for the homeless, so I had more than I needed for my garden tower project. Perfect for my first plant bombing.

I love the idea of people everywhere using public spaces to create edible gardens- why not? There is plenty of useable soil that is getting watered. And, while I love flowers and anything green, why not plant something green that also makes food?

I must have heard the term guerilla gardening somewhere, but I am not sure. To be honest, I just googled it for the first time just this minute, and found that its actually a thing. I love it!

Its hard to tell from these photos, but here is the before picture- you can see my little tray of vegetable bearing plants on the right-

And here is the after photo. Again, its hard to really tell yet, they are so small its not a dramatic difference.

It was also really fun to do. I sort of don't do things that aren't fun if I can help it- but I do if I have to. However, this was indeed fun, and I would highly recommend that you get a gang of people together and go night planting in your neighborhood. Some really hardy plants to start right now are pumpkin plants. Tomatoes are high yield and aren't too finicky. There is a bank by my house with strawberries planted all along in front of it- of course I now love this bank and am thinking of changing over to them.

A lot of guerilla gardeners I am discovering, now that I am looking it up, will use flowering plants to beautify neglected areas, which is awesome, too. Any improvements with nature in areas that neglect to honor it is radical. I still maintain, for my purposes, that I prefer to plant edible plants like lettuces or herbs, or that produce vegetables or fruit.

Try it! Then post about it. Take pictures and upload to facebook- spread the word about the guerilla gardening movement and lets see what happens. This revolution is a gentle one, and calls for a return to simple ways and unplugging as much as we can from the system. We can not unplug completely, but we can all find ways to cut back and get down to brass tacks that work with our lives.

OCCUPY YOURSELF!

-Ashley Dane

I don't know these people, but I love them anyway