Stop That … Um, Gardener?

Published on Wednesday, June 4, 2008, by nicholassday / Edit Post

Guerrilla gardening—planting flowers, fruits, vegetables, insert-seed-here on abandoned or neglected patches of ground—gets lengthy feature treatment in a couple of Left Coast newspapers. In the Los Angeles Times, there’s even a (hilariously ecohip) photo primer on how to make seed bombs (for surreptitious planting). This is guerrilla gardening’s moment: Richard Reynolds, the London founder of the movement, has a just-out book, On Guerrilla Gardening, and so do the folks behind the blog Homegrown Evolution, The Urban Homestead.

As the Times reports, the smallest plots yield impressive returns. A couple of friends recently raised “a farmers market worth of crops—corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, lettuce, watermelon, cucumber and more—in a guerrilla dig at a large planter bed in front of an office building on Bundy Drive in West Los Angeles.” But once they’d planted produce for the winter—“garlic, potatoes, radishes, carrots, lettuce, onions and more”—the property’s owner, after “leaving a cease and desist letter, rototilled the whole plot.”

The article is highly encouraging for gardeners who are working on public land, though. And the Seattle Post-Intelligencer spotlights a push there for legislation that would permit residents to grow vegetables in roadside or median plots. And “[s]ome Seattle officials are pushing for a citywide inventory of public land that could be used to grow food, potentially including parks, land under power lines or even future reservoir caps.”

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POST A COMMENT |4 Comments

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  • JPerry: do you know the term pwned?

  • Who is still using leaded fuels? From Wikipedia: "From January 1, 1996, the Clean Air Act banned the sale of leaded fuel for use in on-road vehicles. Possession and use of leaded gasoline in a regular on-road vehicle now carries a maximum $10,000 fine in the United States. However, fuel containing lead may continue to be sold for off-road uses, including aircraft, racing cars, farm equipment, and...+READ

    Who is still using leaded fuels? From Wikipedia: "From January 1, 1996, the Clean Air Act banned the sale of leaded fuel for use in on-road vehicles. Possession and use of leaded gasoline in a regular on-road vehicle now carries a maximum $10,000 fine in the United States. However, fuel containing lead may continue to be sold for off-road uses, including aircraft, racing cars, farm equipment, and marine engines."

    Sounds more likely that food will be contaminated by lead from leaded fuel used in farm equipment.-COLLAPSE

  • More like, lose, lose. Do any of you ever stop to consider the chemical contamination from planting by a roadside from the vehicles, many of which use leaded fuels? What about pesticides used in planter beds in urban areas?

    So much for the intellect of the foodie nimrods. It seems they're more interested in finding some new trend, or tossing around pathetic terms like guerilla than actually...+READ

    More like, lose, lose. Do any of you ever stop to consider the chemical contamination from planting by a roadside from the vehicles, many of which use leaded fuels? What about pesticides used in planter beds in urban areas?

    So much for the intellect of the foodie nimrods. It seems they're more interested in finding some new trend, or tossing around pathetic terms like guerilla than actually thinking anything through.

    Grow up and get lives. There are good ideas like public plots, in England they have an established tradition in many areas where urban residents get assigned a plot and they maintain it. But common sense must dictate where food crops are planted.-COLLAPSE

  • What a win-win-win! Gardeners get to garden. People get more locally grown produce and learn more about where food comes from. Public agencies reduce costs (or improve plots at no cost) by having volunteers maintain public land. Go gardeners!