On Saturday, May 10, 2003, at 08:32 PM, Harmon Seaver wrote:
On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 08:00:46PM -0700, Tim May wrote:
I said I saw the same thing in Berkeley and Santa Cruz. Both are said to be "progressive" communities, but in both places the so-called community garden areas are essentially for hoboes and deadbeats to scratch at.
Why would a "clean and sober" person (I'll call them this instead of "gentrified") want to go dig in the dirt where the dogs have crapped, where the addicts have shot up, and where their best tomatoes and zuchinis and whatnot get filched by the bums and addicts?
Sounds like a very poorly administered community garden. The only big city gardens I've seen were in Portland, OR, and they were fenced and gated and locked at night. The gardens themselves looked very productive and well tended. As are all the ones I've ever seen in smaller communities. And as are the ones in NYC that Tyler's reported on. For a short while I was on a list of community garden administrators, I can post the address if you like, perhaps you could get feedback on these particular gardens being the way they are. From that traffic on that list, what you are seeing is not at all the norm.
Declan described the same thing I see. And my brother in LA is a traffic engineer, one responsibilty being traffic issues in and around such "homeless gardens." He reports even worse situations. You still have not explained why government-operated gardens are a good idea. Believe me, there is plenty of land in America, even in cities. And markets solve the problems you described (arguing with city planners about fertilizers and times of operation).
5x9? Why the hell would I bother with a 5x9 plot? The plots in the local gardens here are 20x40 and I had two of them, and even that isn't really at all sufficient. We used to have one garden of 100'x100' down by the house, then another 50x80 up above the house mainly for potatoes and berries, things the deer wouldn't eat, plus my wife's flower gardens.
I gave an example of a garden plot and you argue for statism on the grounds that my example is too small. A 5 x 9 raised bed plot is much larger than most people can handle as a hobb, while doing other things in their life. If they need large amounts of space, even more justification for doing things noncommunally. (My sister sublet her couple of acres just north of Sacramento to a Hmong family. Sure enough, several members of an extended family worked their gardens many hours a week. This is not "hobby" or "incidental" gardening, this is food production for sale at farmer's markets. Which is fine, but it is not the job of a city to buy land to let food producers farm it. It's also not the job of a city to acquire land for hobby producers, either, lest there be any doubt.) You were the one complaining that you had to argue with the communal czars about fertilizer usage and hours of operation. This is like arguing with a "community television board" about which channels are acceptable and which are not, and what the hours of operation should be, when the obvious and cypherpunkish solution is to bypass the community board and and get a satellite dish with Playboy, CNN, Spice, ESPN, and 200 other channels. Or to acquire your own land, or go in with others, where you can set your own policy on fertilizers and operating times. You remind me of the small-town busybodies who attend city council meetings and argue endlessly about what software should be on the "community" computers, when of course the answer is obvious: "none, because it is not the job of government to provide "community access" to computers." --Tim May "Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice."--Barry Goldwater