truth be told

Jean-Paul Says:
February 15, 2009 at 9:21 pm e

As a person who lives in a high-rise filing cabinet for service industry slaves, do you think that it is possible for a person in my position to both reconnect with nature as well as establish a modicum of self-sufficiency as you have through your gardening? Honestly, I read your blog as a fantasy; the idea of having a place to grow food, to connect with nature, to be anything other than a slave waiting on his next scrap of food with all the dependency and desperation of a caged animal — that is a dream from the spot that I currently stand.

My question is: how can a poor urban dweller reconnect with nature as you have? Is it a lost cause? Has the life been sucked out of me?

I don’t live in the country.

I live in Davie, Florida an area which was at one time a booming agricultural center but is now slowly turning into an urban nightmare.

Its a cross between rural cowboy wannabes, trailer park trash and yuppies with horses.

The property I live on basically amounts to at the end of the day as a naked trailer park.

I see potential in this place, alot considering its probably the last 10 acre alternative lifestyle parcel this far South.

And if anyone knows anything at all about South Florida is it absolutely, positively STARVING FOR ANYTHING THAT IS REMOTELY COOL OR EVOLVED.

Actually, it is the most Southern Nudist Camp in the USA.

The property is located in the direct path of runway nine of Fort Lauderdale International Airport (hence my irritation in my gardening blog because they literally zoom over head every fucking five minutes), there are high tension wires all over the place (yes thats right the same ones that cause brain tumors), and not to far away is 595 a major highway which pollutes the air with car exhaust.

I live in an 8′ x 16′ SHED (!!) that was actually converted to be a living space (but they left out the insulation and the wind blows right through the walls) with wavy paneling and crappy formica cabinets.

I have a giant concrete pad as my front yard but was extremely lucky for the tiny as 4′ x 12′ dormant dirt/junk pile that was left from the previous occupant that we converted to a tier garden. The last row of which I found is the only place where food will grow because not enough sunlight reaches this area during our Winter season which is the only time anything will grow down here because the rest of the time its too freakin hot!

I have not bought any of the pots that I am using to grow my food in. They were all salvaged or donated. I am a scavenger! You can too!

I use my pots to grow all kinds of plants that I’ve lined up along my concrete pad.

The owner of this camp has no vision for nature and is more concerned with pouring more concrete pads and collecting rent than he is in gardening or landscaping. He owns other parks and keeps remarking on how much easier this place would be to fill up if it were a textile park.

There are a few things that city dwellers can do without any space at all. You must have windows some place which allow some type of sunlight to enter your space? You can use mirrors to reflect the light back into your apartment and use the reflected light to grow things. You can make a little jungle, right in your living room with plants! Check out TreeHugger’s List of the Top 5 Plants for Improving Indoor Air Quality! And you can grow things to eat! Wheatgrass for instance (the same plant that WholeFoods will charge you $4 per juiced shot of) is an excellent source of chloryphyll and greeny goodness in general and costs like nothing to grow, all you need is trays, water, wheat seeds (berries?) and voila! A non-electric juicer will run you about $50, but thats it. Lettuce is ridiculously easy to grow and grows well in pots.

Seeds of Change sells organic seeds and they have some interesting stuff for sale, like anything from heirloom tomatoes to purple bell peppers and edible flowers.

Another easy seed trick is to buy organic produce that comes with its own seeds and just plant them in the ground. Sometimes that can actually work out to be cheaper than buying the actual seed.

Organic seeds are important to buy, they may run a little pricy but if you know anything about genetic engineering and the monster that is Monsanto then you’ll agree. If not, a must-see-will-freak-you-out documentary is The Future of Food. Another good one is King of Corn.

Anyways, as far as the life being sucked out of you bit, I connect a lot, personally with the plants I grow. I go outside, I talk to them everyday, I stroke their leaves and I connect.

I may not have the privilege of living in the country or going outside and seeing a forest but me and my tomatoes are best friends. I love looking at my colorful zinnias that I started from seed and I like watching my morning glories grow (3rd generation seeds, I’ve been growing them every place I live and keeping the seeds).

There are alot of urban community gardens. Have you researched your area?

We’ve been slowly trying to reclaim gardening space away from more alleged concrete pads. So every time we dig, we find more rock, we make another bed and we plant something that will look so pretty that they could only rip it apart if they had no heart.

In conclusion, I am not too far away from where you are I just have chosen (up until this point) to try and not blog about the negative aspects of where I live for a few reasons. I want to be a solution. But now I realize that maybe instead of blogging like I live in a fantasy world I should share some of the more realistic aspects of my life because maybe it could help other people that live in similar situations.

For instance, would anyone like to hear about/relate to someone who has to deal with/try and eco-educate French Canadian tourists (snowbirds) that drive a 5,000 mile journey to be naked while they dump their beer into the park’s pond, leave their trash for the fish to swim through, threaten to kill the wildlife, build their own septic without asking and are just plain old ecological retards in general? I could write volumes on that!