Garden Like a Pirate
When we first encountered Taylor Arneson, he was bringing back to life the dead, sun-baked soil of an abandoned lot just off Sunset Boulevard in the rapidly gentrifying southern extreme of Los Angeles' Silver Lake district. A nearly featherless rooster, rescued from the streets of Hollywood, pecked at the compost Arneson and a couple of accomplices were spreading. Despite the shabby surroundings we were in the midst of some of the most expensive real estate in the country, on a lot that has stood vacant for many years. Arneson and his crew did not have permission to plant this lot-they are guerilla farmers, repurposing the landscape by planting food.
To the landless urban farmer, every vacant lot, parkway, office building planter and apartment courtyard is a potential cornfield, orchard or vegetable patch. The guerilla farmer is an opportunist, squeezing growing space into the disused cracks of our overpriced and poorly designed urban landscape--those precious interstitial spaces, patches of soil that for one reason or another have been abandoned by absentee landlords, negligent cities, or are caught in some sort of legal purgatory. A pirate of old would always prefer to target a fat, unarmed merchantman over a guarded flotilla. In the same way, a pirate gardener picks the easy targets and avoids the big battles.
To irrigate his guerrilla gardens Arneson taps into the nearest water line. As he says, "Who it's owned by is a minor issue because tap water is so cheap that you can do a large garden for a few dollars a month, especially if you're growing things that are appropriate for the region and you use the water sparingly." Arneson does not go out of his way to contact the owners, but neither does he avoid them., "There's a lot of benefits for both parties. They get their space to look better, so they don't have as many complaints from the neighbors, and I'm building soil for them for when they go to do landscaping in the future." So far his biggest coup is a 15 by 150 foot strip in a disused planter along west Los Angeles' busy Bundy Boulevard where, last summer, he planted peppers, corn, squash, beans, fig trees and a mulberry tree.
Nance Klehm, a professional landscaper and artist in Chicago has done a number of clever appropriations of disused urban land for the purpose of growing food. Her "Neighborhood Orchard" project began several years ago when her neighbor, Trevino, refused to take any money for fixing her furnace. Klehm proposed an exchange, planting an apple tree in his yard in lieu of cash. Trevino responded enthusiastically and several years worth of similar bartering has resulted in what Klehm describes as a loosely organized agglomeration of plantings in her low-income mostly Latino neighborhood on the south side of Chicago.
Neighborhood Orchard is simple and opportunistic, in the best meaning of that word. There's no big mission statement, no non-profit 501c3, no board of directors, merely a set of informal relationships. Klehm does most of the startup work for Neighborhood Orchard, which takes place in backyard gardens, and plants more than the host family can use so that there will be a surplus crop meant for sharing. "Neighborhood Orchard is not organized, we don't have meetings or an end of the year BBQ. People just know that they can go in different yards and pick from them."
The effort has had residual benefits, "It's kind of broken the barriers between our yards," says Klehm. "We borrow tools back and forth. We borrow trucks. So there's other things that have come out of this because we're in other people's yards and spaces and lives in a different way."
For Homegrown Revolution's first foray into piratical gardening, we hijacked the parkway in front of our house, that bit of dirt between the sidewalk and the street that technically belongs to the city, but is the responsibility of the homeowner to maintain. It's yet another space, like the vast asphalt hell of parking lots, garages, freeways, car lots, auto repair shops and junkyards in our car-obsessed city dedicated to the needs of the personal automobile.
We decided to flaunt the city's strict rules about this space which dictates the kind of things that can be planted (basically nothing that would inhibit someone from getting out of their Hummer), and planted a vegetable garden instead. Our neighborhood's interstercial qualities have worked to our advantage: it's the kind of neighborhood where city bureaucrats tend to look the other way.
For our parkway garden we built two six by six foot raised beds, filled them with quality garden soil, and stuck in two matching wire obelisks for growing beans and tomatoes, and also as a nod to aesthetic concerns, since this is a public space. Much to our surprise it has been a big success. The first winter we had a bumper crop of carrots, beans, turnips, garlic, onions, and beets in the winter and the next summer a never-ending crop of cherry tomatoes.
We've encouraged neighbors to help themselves to vegetables from the parkway garden, though few have. Theft is a much smaller problem in public garden spaces then most would imagine. What has been nice has been the conversations we've had with neighbors while watering and tending the space. Several neighbors have said that it encouraged them to plant their own vegetables. Just before Halloween this year, as the corn we planted earlier in the summer neared harvest, we found an elderly neighbor standing and staring at the tall corn stalks. On the verge of tears, she told us that the corn reminded her of life on her family's farm in Cuba before the revolution. Our micro-field of corn was bringing up memories of her father and her life in Cuba some fifty years ago. Ironically, Cuba in recent years has become a leader in exactly this sort of interstercial urban agriculture after the fall of the Soviet Union ended oil subsidies that made large scale industrial farms unworkable. Just to survive, Cubans have had to do exactly the sort of small scale urban plantings that Arneson, Klehm and Homegrown Revolution have been experimenting with.
In part, guerilla gardening is a reaction to the criminally wasteful non-use of land exemplified by vacant lots, parkways, and freeway medians. In Sir Thomas More's Utopia, he says of its residents that they, "account it a very just cause of war, for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated; since every man has by the law of nature a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence."
Such a war was fought here in Los Angeles in the summer of 2006 over the South Central Farm, a community garden turned guerrilla garden cut out of a fourteen acre swath of concrete and asphalt just south of downtown. South Central Farm began as an official community garden after protests by the community over the city's plans to build a trash incinerator on the site. Unfortunately the land reverted back to the developer nine years later, after a closed door City Council session. Despite the city's cowardly return of the land to the developer, the South Central Farmers squatted and continued their urban farming experiment. A long and complex tug of war between the owner, the developer, the city government ensued, and the South Central Farm ended in the early morning hours of June 13, 2006 with the farmer's forced eviction by an army of Los Angeles County Sheriff Department officers. A month later this lush oasis of edible and medicinal plants and trees was bulldozed and the land is, once again, a barren vacant lot.
Perhaps the lesson with South Central Farm is the futility of direct confrontation with the moneyed and politically connected powers that conspire to make our urban spaces "idle and uncultivated." As Arneson and Klehm prove, the best strategy may be to look between the cracks, to cultivate our food in the margins, to abandon the big ideas and mission statements and simply pick up a shovel and plant wherever and whenever we can.
Tips for starting your own pirate garden:
1. Look for disused space near where you live or work. Vegetable gardening is intensive and you'll need to keep an eye on the plants.
2. Is the space weed-whacked on a regular basis? If so find an overgrown space where your plants won't get cut down.
3. Look for easy access to water. Unless you live in a rainy region, that will be key. Consider mixing pirate vegetables in with existing plantings to take advantage of automated watering systems. Just be sure that your food doesn't get sprayed with pesticides.
4. If you don't like the uncertainty of going completely guerilla, ask neighbors, friends and family and your place of work if you can garden on their land. You get space, they get a tended yard, and you all get fresh food. Or approach the owner of an abandoned lots and offer to maintain the lot in return for allowing you to plant a garden.
5. Make seed bombs. Seed bombs are balls of compost, clay, and native plant seeds that can be thrown into vacant lots to germinate wildflowers. For detailed instructions see Heavy Petal.
Homegrown Revolution's Kelly and Erik are the authors of the upcoming handbook The Urban Homesteader, available in spring 2008 through Process Media.
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- 11-28-07
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This is amazing!
It's great to hear that you got a pirate garden going on Bundy! That makes me want to blanket the Ambassador lot with seed bombs. Something positive needs to happen on that haunted lot.
Erin Shaw
life's a garden: dig it CATipillar style
it's easy to brandish just plain folks accursed pirates. we all do just what comes naturally. but in a totally profane cystem, where even Nature has been illegalized (to the point where even much of our best plants and people are labelled illegals): sometimes we do accomplish more by working with the Man. i'm not sure where i stand. i know my personal methodology preferably resides in the above camp; the pathetic aesthetic of d.i.y. et.al. but i can't help but reckon we require both hands of the coin operating working together(indiependantly and co.operatively)
all of a sudden i'm simultaneously thinking of:
1) economic hitman, John Perkin's admonitions, shared with the Equadorian Shuars, he underwent initiation-rites/spiritual-introduction with. in "the World is As You Dream It: Shamanic Teachings from the Amazon and the Andes", they remind us that we are all mutually responsible for the state of things, and everyone must become involved in perpetuating its transformation in order to achieve change. that would include the Man.
2) the successful efforts of Chicago's Resource Center, most notably here: their 'Cityfarm' project. Chicago boasts(?) 80,000+ abandoned/un(der)used lots (and then there's roofs' space on top of that), high rates of un(der)employment, and pollution as well as being at the heighth of culture (culinarily and artistically esp.) at the same time.
Officially non-profit Cityfarm hovers as a sustainable bridge between the Gold Coast and (its now demolished neighboring shame:) Cabrini Green. And it's current Mayor Daly (purportedly) hopes to unlock the keys to the city's transfiguration: morphing urban-grid into a green-scape. the Grid--- itself; a transformative matrix, while not originally born of the Windy City--- surely came of age thereabouts, when the 1893 World's Fair blew the doors off Upton Sinclair's 'Jungle' only to affix them securely unto the Age of Industry. Another great wild fire promises to erupt there.
3) "Cradle to Cradle: remaking the way we make things" authors Brangert and McDonough.
This Chemist and Designer duo have created an veritable industry out of green machinery. they seek to implement, the above-article-mentioned technologies of 'seedbombs', in such ubiquitous and plentifully littered items such as paper cups and bags. They're starting to take Homegrown Revolutionary techniques and applying them on a mass-level.
Mass sea change is what's urgently required of us. And whereas, it's true: each little bit of the world you bite off to process and improve, improves the whole wide world (i postulate that was the operative profundity behind William S. Burroughs' meticulous cleaning method/tantric regiment: 'simply cleaning one surface at a time, everytime you enter a room')... and also probable: we aren't all positioned at the proverbial seat of power; working merely with what's readily at hand--- we should have the squares' power centers' sites centered squarely in our longrange sights, during our longhaul from the garden to hell and back.
~from the philes of stoph
myspace.com/mystophspace
<a href="http://stophstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/thyme-machine.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h81/seekasak/lawng_shot-1.jpg" border="0" alt="guerrrilla garden of mine own..."></a>
Marshalls is the UK’s
You do seem to have a point.
A very under-appreciated post!
In the documentary "2012: Time for Change" Daniel Pinchbeck says that what may be the theme of the film is actually recognizing that "...what's lacking is a coherent positive vision so that people know what they're moving towards." He's exactly right, so it's too bad the authors of the Homegrown Revolution blog on Reality Sandwich were not featured in that documentary, because they are hitting on that coherent positive vision more than anyone else. (Though the above article is expanded in, and the best part of in my opinion, the book "Towards 2012" edited by Pinchbeck). The person in the documentary that came closest to the crucial vision was a woman advocating small-scale permaculture, and Pinchbeck "thinking out loud" questioned whether such a form of agriculture could actually feed all of humanity, surmising that we may actually need big mono-crop fields to meet the demand. She gently corrected him, pointing out that small-scale organic food production actually has a higher yield (not to mention none of the environmental & health problems from chemical/GMO ag). And that was that! Next segment! That woman also mentioned that if we could "build the soil" (make it fertile with organic matter, etc.) on all the arable land in the world then we could actually halt run-away CO2 emissions (and feed the hungry while we're at it). Yes, if we could, a problem I will get to in a minute.
There is definitely some recognition that more local agriculture is part of the new paradigm among activists world-wide, as is portrayed in many artist's renditions of a more utopic future, like that seen at the end of "2012: Time for Change." Yet what I am amazed by is the almost total non-recognition of the insurmountable obstacle to that vision: the forcible restriction to living naturally on the earth by our socio-economic system! Telling people "Hey you should grow a food garden" when they cant afford the land (or time) to do so is not exactly helpful! In the aforementioned art-sequence, corporate buildings go down and gardens with small natural homes go up, with people sharing fruits and vegetables, a wonderful vision, but how exactly are those corporate buildings going to come down and we'll be able to build little earth-ships in their place? I doubt sending a nice petition to the CEO of that company would be effective. But why are those corporate buildings there in the 1st place? How did they get there? Why do we need to buy their consumers goods and make them so rich? The answer to all of the above is also the root problem to our environmental and social problems: CONTROL OF THE LAND BY THE FEW. I know all-caps are frowned upon, but seriously people, this is SO crucial yet for some reason few in America get it! (Respect to The Land is Ours campaign: http://www.tlio.org.uk/). We are money-slaves because we can't live self/community-sufficiently, we can't produce what we need ourselves so we need to be consumers; we need to depend on governments and corporations that together are leading the way to the collapse of our ecosystem and the completion of an Orwellian techno-tyrannical world police-state. Yet many still wait for the latest technological breakthrough, saying "Free energy devices will save us!" or "Anti-gravity will level the playing field". Get real people! Where the hell are these devices? This is more savior-dependent mentality, except Jesus or Quetzalcoatl is replaced with a quantum cubadecahedron whatever-the-fuck. Stick to REALITY! Reality is we are humans living on the EARTH, you know, that stuff under all the concrete beneath your shoes. And anyway how will this technology be created? In factories? How will the resource extraction and waste be organized and handled? By "benevolent" governments? Or some Venus Project type scheme where supercomputers, controlled by "experts", track, extract and distribute all of the Earth's natural resources? We're back to square-one. Humanity has become hypnotized by technology, and neutered by our false parental overlords, even while our health (mental & physical) deteriorates as our dependency on both increases. "Oh but just wait!" they say, "Soon we will have water-powered cars made out of hemp and free energy devices made from materials they make themselves, like a Star Trek replicator." "It's techno-industrial society 2.0!" Yeah right...
Getting back to a more sane and realistic perspective, in the print-version of the above post by Homegrown Revolution they hit it on the money when they say "Get into this a little, and you'll realize that all of your life you've been cheated." So true. A couple paragraphs later in the book version they actually say the magic words that could save our world, probably skimmed over by those lacking the awareness to have such an appropriately earth-centric perspective: "...claim land and become a pirate gardener." CLAIM LAND. GROW FOOD. Something like two acres of arable land per family (whatever form that "family" may take), free of cost and taxation, is getting at a real tangible answer. Land needs to be fairly distributed; empty concrete lots, golf-courses, etc. need to be claimed and occupied by families. Those that already have a home and land to grow food on can of course just stay put, except they stop paying the mortgage and taxes, so they will have the free-time (no longer being $-slaves) to live self-sufficiently. All other supposed solutions, as I have briefly pointed out here, are basically bullshit. Later in the article is another gem, a golden paragraph if you will: "[G]uerilla gardening is a reaction to the criminally wasteful non-use of land exemplified by vacant lots, parkways, and freeway medians. In Sir Thomas More's Utopia, he says of its residents that they, "account it a very just cause of war, for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated; since every man has by the law of nature a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence." BY THE LAW OF NATURE A RIGHT. The reason we live in this exploitative/destructive/unnatural society is because we are not claiming our NATURAL RIGHT to live as natural women and men on the earth. LAND & WATER IS A HUMAN RIGHT! Not something to be given to us by government officials, something we should have automatically; we are said to be "born into" whatever nation-state and therefore automatically be a "citizen" of whatever unnatural/unjust social-system exists at that time and place. And this social contract doesn't require our signature of course, that's automatic too. Bullocks! We are HUMANS first, not "citizens!" This is the age-old "Devil's Bargain": in exchange for added "security" and "services" we have to relinquish our freedom, we have to give up the possibility of living natural, fulfilling and ethical lives, we have to submit to an unprincipled, tyrannical and totally unsustainable system of false authority and hierarchy. The answer is personal SOVEREIGNTY, more specifically, sovereign veganic homestead communities, as I have written about on my Evolver page blog.
The above article finishes by referencing the plight of South Central Farm (as shown in the must-see documentary "The Garden" http://www.thegardenmovie.com/), which is the plight of most of humanity past and present, that have tried to resist assimilation this Babylon System, like Native Americans who had their land taken and crops destroyed as shown in another must-see documentary "Broken Rainbow" (http://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/11/movies/film-broken-rainbow-documentary...). The Homegrown Revolution authors then encourage us to engage in more guerrilla gardening as the best course of action. This is good of course, but without having control of the land, all these new gardens that are created can (and probably will) be bulldozed away just like South Central Farm was. That terrible destructive act was, lo-and-behold, supported by the industry-backing city council despite immense popular protest against the eviction! Hmm, ever read the definition of fascism? Corporatism? Remember the largest protests in history against the Iraq invasion that were completely ignored? The list of examples of government & corporate collusion against the public will is endless. End the denial! (If you haven't already). We don't have "representative democracy", and it's impossible anyway except on the most local of levels, the homestead.
Isn't that the reality? Doesn't that all make sense? Without land & water as a human right we can't create a significantly better world. The few power/money-crazed that do control our birthright and use the threat of force to continue the status-quo will continue to be destructive control-freaks into the foreseeable future, asking them through petition or voting (which is a joke really) to stop fucking up the world and our lives is like politely asking an insane person you see walking down the street to stop being crazy, and actually expecting him to instantly change. More wishful thinking, just like that with technological or religious saviors.
May this message actually reach people, because damn it's frustrating to know there actually is a solution (that's desperately needed right now) but witness people ignorantly dismiss it.
Peace
Colin D.
These are really useful tips