Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Community gardens

I had an idea today. I volunteer at a food garden at the Mission. I show up once a week and mostly just water and weed and sometimes I clean up the pathways or spread mulch around or do something that's relatively physical. I haven't really learned much about planting things. Which led me to my idea. We ought to have community gardens.

We have community garden plots now. You get your name on a waiting list and when your number comes up, you get a garden plot in on a communal property that you can garden all for yourself. The trouble is, it's all for yourself. What if there were community gardens where you showed up, put in your time doing whatever you are best at and earned a share of the harvest. That way, black thumb people like me who only know how to weed and water wouldn't end up without any food for our efforts.

When the end of cheap oil comes and we all have to depend on homegrown food again (have to? maybe the proper word is get to) it might be better if we could grow food as a community rather than in solitude. Doing everything solitary is too much like our modern society anyway. And not as much fun as doing it with others. We could also preserve the harvest communally and distribute our surplus to old and feeble people who can't help out at all. There's no reason we have to continue such solitary lives as we've been trained to live.

While I was working in the garden today, another one of those rifts in time and space opened up and there I was working in the garden, as my normal daily job, and I was taking piles of weeds to the compost pile and this was how we women were all surviving in the post-economic breakdown America. We were talking about canning and dehydrating and solar ovens. And we were happy.

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