Fwd: [Community_garden] Charlotte CG Check list and Failure to Thrive in Lubbock

Karen Jones <k.j...@uwinnipeg.ca> · Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:22:01 -0500

About a decade ago, in Winnipeg,Provincial  government Agencies started noticing that communities were establishing gardens on lots in the city most of which had arson events on them (read vacant house burnt down).  Someone told me, that there is no such thing as vacant land, just vacant minds. These were truly grass roots gardens. People interested in gardening approached the owners of the land and asked if they could garden. There was no funding involved, no administrators involved, no surveys or planning meetings, just people with spades and seed packets. No water. These people did this every year for decades. They didn't produce alot of food or even claim that they were dealing with urban hunger. They weren't all poor.  What they did have in common is that most of the gardeners and garden visitors (there were alot of them) didn't have cottages to escape the urban heat and most of the gardeners lived in apartments. Some of the gardeners just wanted a place where there cou
ld be peace and quiet and no one would try to harass them, or worse.  That can be hard to find if you live in a concrete jungle in a tiny apartment with an abusive spouse, for example.  These were gardens that were in-ground and use designed.  All of them were characterized by a central path, or short cut that brought pedestrians into the garden.  Alot of the time there was more conversation going on than gardening. Weeds were a given, but 2 or 3 hours weeding can make the most troubled of people forget their anger and frustration for a moment. Our garden was on a really busy thoroughfare, but often the gardeners wouldn't notice the traffic. 
I remember a father planting potatoes and bringing his kids back to dig them up. He said he was going to show them where french fries came from. They were incredulous when he showed them potatoes in the ground and they initially accused him of going to the store and buying potatoes and burying them in the ground to fool them. He also taught them that beans come from the little flowers on the plant. 
About a decade ago a Provincial Agency noticed that this garden was very visible and very popular among the gardeners, they also had their eye on the garden site to build housing. They also noticed that they could install box gardens for about $2,000.
They also declared war on the long established in ground Community Garden. And they also tried to destroy the Community Garden by telling gardeners that if they left the inground garden they could 'manage' another garden at another site. A garden without weeds and with water and with 'Funding'.
To date we have quite a few of these box-gardens which have been abandoned and the Agency hires a couple of  teenagers to weed them.  But they still keep on opening them up in other areas. 
The Agency developed a Green Plan which excluded the long established in ground Community Garden and they wanted to get the City to approve it. Needless to say a core group of gardeners took time off work to go to City Hall to oppose it. After two years of this the City decided last month, not to approve this Green Plan because it excluded significant green spaces like our long time garden. 
Why this fuss, why the lawyers, why didn't they support the garden that the Community had chosen long before the Agency showed up in our community?
The Agency is a housing agency which got it self into some financial difficulty, with all the funding they get from the Government they bought the in-ground garden and see it as money in the bank. 
They created many of these now abandoned box gardens in order to be able to say, 'The People Don't Need this Garden', we will build housing on it. 
Trouble is though, people love the space. 
The moral for the Story is that in this part of the world, Housing Agencies and Gardens don't mix.  The Agencies have wasted alot of public money and caused discord.  And all their work has resulted in alot of abandoned box gardens, which look pretty terrible after a couple of years.  The Agencies didn't get it, allottment gardens and community gardens are not the same.  I think there will always be a community garden somewhere, but allottment gardens are just agency projects which will fail to thrive when the funding runs out. Maybe something like that happened in Lubbock Texas.  It is bad news when Government starts running Community Gardens.   Sorry for the length of this post, it would have been shorter if it had not been so long. 

Karen 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20110621/11fa12b7/attachment.html>
_______________________________________________
The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org

To post an e-mail to the list:  communit...@list.communitygarden.org

To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription:  http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org

Subject:	[Community_garden] Charlotte CG Check list and Failure to Thrive in Lubbock
Date:	Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:22:01 -0500
From:	Karen Jones <k.j...@uwinnipeg.ca>
To:	<communit...@list.communitygarden.org>

Fwd: [Community_garden] Charlotte CG Check list and Failure to Thrive in Lubbock

Don Lambert

c m