Posted on 07/13/2008 6:58:52 PM PDT by Lorianne
Could growing fresh vegetables help save crumbling inner cities around the world and tackle hunger? ___
That is the ambitious aim of a charity called Urban Farming, which has its headquarters in Detroit, the capital of the US's wilting car industry.
The idea is very simple: turn wasteland into free vegetable gardens and feed the poor people who live nearby.
Motown has lost more than a million residents since its heyday in the 1950s and it is common to see downtown residential streets with just a few houses left standing.
Taja Sevelle saw the hundreds of hectares of vacant land in the city and came up with the idea of creating an organic self-help movement that would be "affordable (and) practical".
Beginning three years ago, armed with $5,000 (£2,500) and a pamphlet, the singer and entrepreneur managed to win a wide cross-section of support around the city. Now her charity is expanding across the US.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
We can recapture those glory days! Here's how: find a vacant lot and grow some zucchini, some tomatoes -- and arugula! Yeee Haaa!
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
from “The Gift Outright” by Robert Frost
Vegetables grow outdoors, and require a couple of months to mature. Thus, one needs respectful neighbors and/or rule of law to successfully grow a garden. One could also substitute $1000s of dollars worth of fencing, security cameras or guards, but a few dollars worth of vegetables is hardly worth that.
No...not arugula.....wa’mellon and dates.
Nah, the "poor" get food stamps and have NO incentive whatsoever to farm.
If someone suggests cotton, there will be riots!
lol!
is that union?
How much is Kwame’s cut?
You can grow some crops indoors. Some houses in Detroit already have amazing hydroponic systems! And they are producing a small scale cash crop!
Kids swiping fruit is nothing new. There's a Russian immigrant family down the block from me and their kids picked a lot of unripe fruit too, but they never did any serious damage to my trees, so I let it go.
It would be kind of cool to change Detroit’s name to Starnesville.
The fact that it can be helpful from a food point of view is unmistakeable. There are many people living in cities who are growing whole gardens' worth of vegetables, in 5-gallon buckets in their backyards and on their balconies. "Square-foot gardening," it's called.
Is it a replacement for having successful industries? No. But if there's no industry, it's better than just letting the land revert to scrub wilderness.
Vegetables in high crime areas are going to be stolen as soon as they ripen. Hide and watch.
Hope your trees get big quickly so they cannot damage them or steal all the fruit. Doesn’t look like they were even eating much of what was stolen. A little stealing is good. It means you have a good product
My wife loves growing herbs (legal stuff - no really.) So I bought her an Aero-Garden for Christmas. It dawned on me that there was no way in the world that the thing was worth what it cost in terms of the rosemary and basil it could grow. I suspect the makers were actually targeting a slightly more lucrative market...
If it takes vacant land and makes it productive, probably a good idea. Making poor people earn their food in a labor of love than just handing out food stamps, great. Saving money on groceries for many and maybe adding more local jobs (in pest control, transporting goods), great.
However, this isn’t going to solve all of Detroit’s problems. What they need are income producing jobs, and that won’t come without a safe environment, which liberals claim can’t come without jobs ...
Something is better than nothing, so I guess I agree with your statement. However, to use land in what was once a major American city, and to fall back on subsistence-level farming, is to go back in time at least two centuries.
This is what the Progressives consider enlightened policy. Let's all progress -- forward to the year 1800!
I also doubt that many of them do a whole lot of scratch cooking and vegetable preparation.
I'd be willing to bet that McDonalds, KFC, and Taco Bell are their diets of choice.
And given their afrocentric slave-sensitive culture in which today's blacks are being indoctrinated, there ain't no way they're going to be out in a field swinging a hoe in the sun. And you can take that to the bank.
"affordable (and) practical"
Free or affordable, which is it? Since nothing is "free" I'll guess affordable.
Thanks for mentioning “heirloom tomatoes”...I’d seen that term in
once of the seed catalogs (Burpees, IIRC)...and had no clue what it meant.
Thanks because the mention motivated me to track down the meaning(s)
of the term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heirloom_tomato
You know you may closer than you suspect. In the first half of the 1800 there was a slave revolt in what is now Haiti. The (negro) chased out and/or killed that whites, slave owners or no. Afterwards, there was this unspoken understanding that they -- the black Haitians -- were never, ever going to work in those fields no more. Oh, maybe a little vegetable garden around the house but may be not even that. Cheeze, this was the tropics! That's plenty of wild food everywhere.
And, it is said, that attitude is one of the main reasons Haiti never developed. They weren't gonna be "slaves", to anything, no more.
Why is the neighborhood a dump and the City in the red? Give it time...the have-nots will raid (or in Detroit fashion -burn) the pantry.
The planter boxes were a one time cost - and I might add unnecessary. Tomatoes do just fine in the ground. The seeds you can recoup from this years crop. So your cost this year would be water, a bag or two of compost, a good deep soak once a week, and that's about it. And when tomato vines get going, THEY GET GOING. You've got a lot of tomatoes. And let's not get started on zucchinis.
Who wants to hoe and water and weed and pick when you can just cash your welfare check and go shopping?
Marxist magic: It costs someone, but not everyone...
From MoTown to Mulch Ground! Maybe those collard greens will do a nice job of camoflauge for the rows of hemp crops.
Somehow the liberal pols in Michigan will find a way to tax the urban grown produce.
Color me cynical on the grand idea.
I am just thinking that an inner city plot of land is going to be exposed to a bunch of pollution. Everything from lead paint and asbestos when the building was demolished to whatever chemicals was dumped there in 1890 when the area may of been a good rural area just outside the city to dump industrial chemicals.
I can’t imagine the liberal bums in Michigan hoeing ground, planting seed and harvesting a crop, unless it’s stealing the work of your neighbor.
Michigan is infested with shysters, thieving bureaucrats and crooked quacks who have made an industry of landing SS disability and workmen’s comp for fat, liberal slobs. That’s one of two things Michigan’s liberals will work for. The other is mentioned in the first paragraph,
I have one of those bought about 2 years ago. The best, most reasonable crop is salad greens/lettuce. No, you don’t actually save a lot, but your lettuce is fresh for the picking, you get enough for 3-4 dinner salads (mixed w/other produce, of course) every couple of days after about a month and this continues for 4 months. It is best in winter, as hot weather makes lettuce quite leggy and it will bolt quickly if you don’t keep it cut back by harvesting the large outer leaves and letting the small inner ones continue to grow. It costs $20/crop and the electrical useage is minimal. You can cut the per crop cost by investing in the kit of pods that allows you to use your own seeds (I am thinking about this).You also save the trip to the store and if you use Green Bags, your harvest can be kept for a few weeks before use. Herbs, tomatoes and snow peas were a waste of time: teeny harvest and flavor was lacking, except for the basil and cilantro. Some crops need dirt to actually develop quantity and taste.
As for the other herb crop, I am a child of the Sixties and there is no way the AeroGarden can accomodate a tap root and even a two foot high plant. Maybe the largest one could grow something like that, but that is a heavy investment. I suppose people might try to hack the device for that purpose, but I remember seeing some indoor growing operations back in the day and they take a relatively larger amount of space, water, pumps and light.
...after decades of piling up fertilizer, the mayor’s scandal has put Detroit over the top...
If you would like to be added or dropped from the Michigan ping list, please freepmail me.
This summer my two younger boys and I are taking part in a local garden club. Between 20 and 30 kids, 75% of whom are minority, and a handful of adults, all of them white. The kids really like working in the garden, and they all love to eat the fresh fruits and veggies. I understand why, I think. When I was a kid, candy was a rare (and therefore special) treat, and fast food was unheard of. The kids in the gaden club, the opposite is true for them. They seem to get such a kick out of how different everything tastes from what they are used to eating.
Our neighborhood community police officer has to do a drive-by of the garden four or five times a night. It's completely open, and the park in which it resides is also home to a half-court. Early in spring, some idiots emptied all of the park's garbage cans into the outdoor beds (which had't been planted yet) and knifed a half dozen slashes in our treasured hoop house. Bastards.
Lorianne, this has been done for many years in Detroit. A couple of empty lots in my Dad's ‘hood have legal plants growing on them. Some others look like there is an urban forest on them.
I've been working on his house, while he's in the hospital, there has been a raccoon and a possum in his backyard this month.
I find it amazing that the BBC would run a story talking about gardening. What’s next? I guess I should start a non profit (yeah right!) charity that collects money to distribute clotheslines. Then maybe the BBC will run a story about a new fangled idea to hant clothes outside to dry them!
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