Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Well, we're all free to disagree, and I disagree. I do not agree anything
that gets people excited about growing food is good. Starting all wrong
turns people off to growing like nothing else can. They pick the wrong
place, try to plant in bad soil, fail to mulch or water, or overwater, let
it get overgrown with weeds or work too hard weeding, and surprise! the
bugs get it first. Happens all the time. The usual reaction is, gardening
is too much work and too little results. Forget it. Medians and vacant lots
make the worst possible start. 

Street medians are poisonous. Want your food plants to breathe exhaust
fumes all day? Go right ahead.

Sure, making vacant lots into gardens are a cute story for Link TV et al.
But suitable vacant lots are very few and far between. Think. Those lots
are someone else's property. Unless you get written permission, you're
trespassing. Unless you get a long term lease, you may or may not get use
of it for a whole season, much less several years to make it worthwhile to
build up soil and fence out intruders. And if it's a group effort, who's
doing the work and providing the know how, and who's picking the harvest?
Talk about a mess. 

Go right ahead with street theater and art swaps. The street people will
either laugh at you or mug you. You hope we don't let what is ideal get in
the way of what is better than nothing. Nice philosophy but has nothing  to
do with actually growing food you can eat. End of story.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 4/3/2007 at 9:07 AM Douglas  Willhite wrote:
(my post deleted for space)
>Thanks for the letter, Paul. I've included it in my posting to the group
>in case you haven't posted it already.
>
>While I agree with much of what you've said, and I have no monetary or
>emotional investment in any book or web site, I think anything that gets
>folks excited about growing food is good -- especially here in the United
>States where there's such a disconnection between food producers and
>consumers. Unanticipated disruptions in the supply chain could make for a
>lot of hungry and irate people.
>
>I live rurally and haven't had to resort to trying to build healthy soil
>in vacant lots or on road medians but that may be the only opportunity
>that some who are homeless or living in high rises have -- that and
>container gardening. I've seen programs on Link TV (Direct TV Channel 375)
>which illustrated that some neighborhood groups have indeed created
>thriving gardens on vacant lots and benefited from them.
>
>I'm no authority on hungry people -- never having met anyone who was truly
>starving -- but it's conceivable that street theater and art swaps could
>help in keeping the spirits of hungry people up if all they had to eat was
>the bare minimum -- say a potato or a cup of rice.
>
>So I hope we don't let what is ideal get in the way of what is better than
>nothing.
>
>Take care,
>Doug 
>
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