Earlier in the week,
an interview with me appeared on
YourGardenShow.com's blog. Obviously, this interview took place before the destruction of my primary gardening area to put down this driveway:
Now, the question "What's your greatest challenge food gardening?" would be answered with something like: "My greatest challenge is overcoming the continued obstacles the trailer park management keeps putting in my path. Before we ever signed a lease here, we asked extensive questions about whether gardening was allowed, to what extent, and specifically about my ideas for the yard. I was told all of that would be fine. Before signing, I read the lease carefully to make sure there was nothing in there that would present any problems. I found nothing. However, when the trailer park manager saw what I was doing, she started to try to change the rules on me. I will not give up and continue to do what I must to feed my family, operating within the confines of our lease agreement and the geographic limitations. I don't know whether it is intentional or not, but a recent decision by management, to create a crushed asphalt driveway where the part of my garden the manager expressed the greatest personal displeasure with, dealt a crushing blow to my garden.
I will not be defeated though. Instead, I see this as a new opportunity. I no longer have to deal with worrying about how much of the grass is torn up in this area, since management made the decision to cover the whole area! Instead, I can create more garden in the same limited area, since now my paths can be more narrow and I will have more opportunities for vertical growing."
The full interview, including my original answer to that question and a picture of what the trailer park manager found so terrible that she gave me a written notice on Augest 5 to "please remove garden & restore grass area" (and then this week was covered by crushed asphalt. See why I'm suspicious that it was done specifically to thwart me?) can be found by clicking here.
(There is a giant hint about some of my plans for next year's garden in the forefront of the picture on the interview as well.)
Am so sorry to hear of the conflict you're having to deal with :(
ReplyDeleteI talked to hubby about it this morning, and he said to go talk to upper management again, the people who told the manager to back off. Make a big media blitz again, just as you did before. Then point out that said asphalt wasn't done to others, and that originally you were to *restore* the grass and now it's ALL gone, etc etc. Show it's targeted.
ReplyDeleteThen he HIGHLY suggests you give them various opportunities to make it better. A) take out the yuck and replace it with viable soil (total cost about $500 or so). B) provide you with stock tank containers for gardening (the nicest available and you can paint them to be *truly* beautiful), total cost about $200 each. He says the cost of backhoe and soil replacement is cheaper than anything else, and if that's really what you want, go for the snazziest containers as a price comparison, so they WANT to put soil down.
Whatever you do, you have troops standing with you. *hugs*
I had my whole garden in raised beds on a parking lot with even worse gravel. They grew great! Lots of horse poo in them. Yours will be even better!! :)
ReplyDeleteAllyson, I can't prove anything about being picked on at this point, so I'm going to hold off on the media blitz for now. HOWEVER, if they try to stop my container garden in the driveway, that's it. There is absolutely NO REASON for that, and the calls to the media will go right out. I'm not ready to do that at this point though.
ReplyDelete@Kellie, that's pretty much my plan, but I probably will have more access to cow poo than horse poo. I'll likely end up with a good mix of composts, which is good :-)