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

Urban Gardening

Right about the time I realized I needed to change the way I was looking at, and living, my life, I was lucky enough to have two unused garden towers in my proximity that I could learn to use. At my work, my boss had purchased two of them, but no one had championed the cause. It was perfect synchronicity. How many people living in cities don't have the option of growing their food, due to lack of soil or space? Plenty, I bet. Me included.

I also have the good fortune of having someone show me how to get these things started. There are so many ways to talk oneself out of doing something- "I don't know how", or "Maybe next week," or "I can't afford it," or "It won't work." The universe in all its goodness eliminated all such conversations from my head. If I can learn how to do these things, I can teach others. Its amazing to me that the most radical thing any of us can do is to get back to nature as much as possible- and there is nothing more natural than growing your own food.

So my friend who came to help also takes care of the garden towers at Step Up on Second, which is an organization which helps the homeless in Los Angeles. They have a small café where they serve hotdogs and hamburgers, and the homeless people on the program work the café and learn how to have a job. There are many aspects to this organization, and they are doing amazing work. One aspect is the garden towers on the roof- I think he said there were 25 of them, and they grow food that they can use to help feed the homeless people who come through while they teach them how to be self sustaining.  Here is a picture below- pretty amazing. By the way- you can make monthly payments for a garden tower, and they payments are reasonable.

Garden Towers at Step Up on Vine

My friend and I first started to create the seedlings. I got seed packets of peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, arugula. We put rock wool into plastic trays with individual growing bins- you do this so the roots don't grow into each other. Then you put 4 or 5 seeds in each one, and cover with a nutrient rich covering. Its important to mark what you planted- we did it with coffee stirrers with the name of the vegetable and the date on the back. Then you soak the seed beds, but be careful not to disturb the seeds.

The start of an urban garden



If you were not going to use a tower and were going to go guerilla gardening (which I implore you to do) then you would do the same thing but you could use potting soil which is already fortified with nutrients. In guerilla urban gardening, you would plant vegetables or other edibles in public spaces, or in front of your apartment building, on medians, on the courthouse lawn, parks, etc. Nothing at all wrong with doing this!  once your seedlings are good and strong, plant them where they will be able to get water- any public landscaping will have sprinkler systems.

So in about two weeks, we will have little seedlings. Every day I need to lightly water the seedlings and not leave too much water in the bottom tray- or they roots will grow down towards the water, and we'd rather encourage the plants to grow towards the sun.

Once they are seedlings, we transfer them to the garden towers. The towers only need to be filled with water and the nutrient solution and then you basically leave them alone and let them grow. You need to have access to an outlet as they need to plug in for the water to pump up through to each little basket. My first plants I put in my garden tower are growing- some died. White flies got to many of them. If you have white flies, a water and dish soap solution sprayed onto the leaves makes them go away.


Here is my vision- I want to teach people how to create urban gardens and beehives. Bees have a higher rate of survival in cities, and you can have your own source of honey. The gardens can give you certain vegetables and fruit- I am staying away from things like lettuce or herbs right now and focusing on things like tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers- its easy enough to get salad stuff from the farmer's market. I would like to help people understand the importance of buying from their local farmer's markets- its fresh, generally organic, and has not taken a lot of fossil fuels to send on trucks and airplanes from distant countries to your grocery store chain. I know we can't grow everything, and we can't buy everything at the farmer's market- but we can do a lot, and its a great start.

When I go to the farmer's market, I look at the people there and am so happy to be among like minded people. Its revolutionary. Buying local instead of at the supermarkets takes money out of the hands of those who seek to control the world's food sources.  There is much more at the farmer's market than produce- there is bread, meat, fish, eggs- you can get a lot of your shopping done there. the more you buy there, the more you are telling the GMO food corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta to fuck the fuck off.

OCCUPY YOURSELF!!!