Victory?--a Trailer Park Homestead update bonus post & action alert

We just met with the trailer park manager and her supervisor as planned.  Basically, they came out, took some pictures, and said they were going to leave the final decision to their higher-ups (bet ya have an idea where I'm going with this already, don't ya).  The manager's supervisor said that his feeling on it was they were just going to go with it for this year and then ask for guidelines from the higher level people for future years.  They also mentioned the possibility of asking me to run a community garden in the trailer park (toward the back, of course) next year.  Basically, they admitted to never having seen anything like this before, so they weren't sure what to do about it!

So here's what you can do:  contact Sun Communities management on their contact form and let them know how important growing one's own food can be and that they should offer full support to anyone that wants to, whether it be on their own lot or in a community garden or both.  Remind them that lawns are costly to maintain and pointless, or talk about how edible landscaping is a growing trend and just as beautiful, if not more so, than purely decorative plantings.  The purpose would be to educate, not alienate, so definitely keep these messages extremely positive. 

Decorative or edible?  A lot of people would never know, until the pumpkins appear!

The War on Gardens Continues

When Julie Bass's lawyer went to the courthouse to file a motion regarding the case against her "renegade" front yard gardening activities, he was informed that the charges against her for the garden had been dropped.  Yay!  Right?  Wrong.  Now, they've slapped her with some trumped up charges for dog licenses that she's already paid and she still has a hearing on July 26, but now for the dog license misdemeanor charge (did I mention that there is no unlicensed dog at her house now and the only way that they would even know there ever was unlicensed dogs on her property was if Oak Park a-holes were looking for something to charge her with since her dogs are well taken care of and don't run loose in the neighborhood?).  Not only that, but since Julie never had her day in court or was officially cleared of "wrongdoing" (seriously, is a garden ever "wrongdoing?"), they can bring the charges back up once the media spotlight has cleared back up.  Tricky bastards, aren't they?  Let's not make it that easy on them, shall we?  We've been doing a great job with the calls and emails (not so much with the death threats and such though.  That's too much and I wouldn't be surprised if that's part of why they are being such...looking for a nice word....bureaucrats.  Okay, I couldn't come up with an actual nice word, but that one is at least allowed on television), so let's keep the pressure on until they are leaving the Bass family alone for good!  For your convenience, here is the contact info for key players in this nonsense:

Mayor:
Gerald E. Naftaly 248.691.7410      gnaftaly@att.net

City Council:  all phone calls go to 248.691.7410
Angela Diggs Jackson   adjack@comcast.net
Paul Levine   paul4oakpark@yahoo.com
Emily Duplessis   duplessis2@aol.com

Oakland County Prosecutor:

Jessica R. Cooper   248-858-0656  info@oaklandprosecutor.org

Meanwhile, up in Canada, a man is currently facing the prospect of six months in jail for his lovely organic mini-farm on his 2.5 acres!  Dirk Becker of Lantzville, British Columbia has been cited with violating a bylaw against property owners letting their land become "unsightly" and has been ordered to "remove the piles of soil and manure from the property".  Again, the whole thing is rather ridiculous, to put it nicely, and you can click here to see how insane it is, including seeing pictures of before he took ownership of a property that was basically a gravel pit and the gorgeous farm he turned it into that apparently city officials find "unsightly."  Either they have vocabulary issues on par with Kevin Rulkowski's definition of "suitable" or they have something against plant matter!  Now, I'm not too familiar with how the Canadian political system works, but I did find a general office number for the District of Lantzville (250-390-4006) and a general email being listed as district@lantzville.ca, so we might want to give them a heads up that food growing is a good thing and plants are far more beautiful than a barren wasteland, eh?  (I'm from Michigan, so I can do the whole "eh?" thing too.  It isn't a Canada joke, really...although that is kind of funny)

As this insane war on gardens continues, it reiterates the point I made a couple weeks ago that there should be a recognized Right to Garden everywhere.  I listed the contact info, or at least how to find the contact info for US Congress people on my original Right to Garden post, so if you wanted to pursue making this a federal law in the United States, that would be a good place to get started. Canadians, since this seems to be a problem for you too, you might want to get in touch with your government as well!

Defending Your Freedoms

Happy Independence Day, fellow Americans!

A lot of people talk about our independence as if it is something secure, something we can count on being there forever.  We can't.  If we don't stick up for our freedoms, they can be eroded away until nothing is left.

You think it can't happen?  It is happening right now.  Take the case of Maryanne Godboldo from Detroit, MI whose daughter was kidnapped by the government because she refused to pump her full of drugs that were making her sicker.  Look at all the areas where you can't legally collect your own rainwater (although apparently this is improving in a lot of places, thanks to people challenging the laws).  Look at Julie Bass of Oak Park, MI who is currently facing misdemeanor charges for growing food in her own front yard, since they claim it violates the city's ordinance that front yards must contain "suitable plant material".

These are all freedoms that are being stolen, bit by bit.  There are literally millions of examples that I could cite of freedoms disappearing daily.  I just list these ones because they directly affect our pocketbooks as well as our freedom.

It is our patriotic duty as Americans to do something about this.

Write letters to officials and politicians responsible for making these laws.  Actively campaign for or at least vote for politicians that support our freedoms.  Vote out the ones that don't.  Support things like the Right to Garden legislation I proposed a couple posts ago to protect our rights and make it harder for them to sneak them away.

So what am I doing this Independence Day?  Having a cook-out with my family here at the Trailer Park Homestead, going to see a nice small town parade, watching some fireworks....and getting a dictionary ready to mail to the city planner of Oak Park, since apparently he doesn't know what the definition of "suitable" is (hint: he thinks it means "common").

If anyone else would like to send photos of front yard vegetable gardens, to demonstrate how suitable vegetables are for front yard plant materials, or dictionaries to the city planner of Oak Park, so they can look up the definition of "suitable", the address is:

Kevin Rulkowski, City Planner
City of Oak Park
13600 Oak Park Blvd
Oak Park, MI 48237

The Right to Garden--A Call to Action

A major theme of this blog is that you can save a ton of money on food by growing some of it yourself, whether you can only find room for a plant or two in containers, turn your whole yard into a garden a la Edible Estates (or my Trailer Park Homestead, to a slightly lesser extent), or something in between.  I've maintained that anyone can grow a garden on some scale.  Some readers have argued that that isn't true though.  Some places, anything from areas with homeowner associations to low-income housing apparently have regulations that say that you can't garden at all in any form in some cases.  In other cases, residents are only allowed to grow decorative plants (the example cited in this case was specifically low-income housing).

This has to change.

In this time of economic difficulty for so many people, being able to grow their own food should be viewed as a fundamental human right. 

What I propose is federal "Right to Garden" legislation that would guarantee the right of everyone to grow food in some fashion.  I think that it should state that anywhere that gardening of ornamental plants is allowed, edibles should also be allowed.  If a landlord doesn't want the ground of their property torn up, they should not be able to prevent tenants from at least having a container garden.

I find it especially upsetting that low-income housing would restrict tenants from growing food.  These people are most likely dependent on food assistance from the government in addition to the housing assistance, so wouldn't it make more sense for the government to encourage people to grow their own food rather than restrict it?  This is why I think this should be pushed at the federal level: food stamp funding is largely (if not entirely, I'm not really sure) federal, so these stupid policies are cutting into the federal budget, so that is where the problem should be addressed.

With all this in mind, I'm writing my US Senators and Representative this week, along with Michelle Obama, since this issue fits so nicely with her Let's Move campaign to end childhood obesity.  I urge you to do the same.

I'll even make it easy on you:

Click here to find your Senators' contact information 

Click here to find your Representative's contact information

Michelle Obama can  be contacted at:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Feel free to share your letters here in the comments and please share this post with your friends so they can help promote the Right to Garden as well!

Best $10 I've Never Spent

On one of the Facebook pages I'm on, the administrator recently asked "What would you do if you had $100 to spend, but you couldn't spend it on yourself, your family, or your friends?"  There were all sorts of responses about giving to various charities, to help out various causes, but my answer was a little bit different.  I answered that I would use that money to buy seeds and start a community garden in a low income area.  I was thinking that maybe that hypothetical community garden could be used as a launching point to teach local people to grow their own food and give them the tools and the power to never go hungry again.

My oldest son helping out at a community garden we were involved with last year

The next day, she asked a little different question.  She asked "If you had $10 to spend, but you couldn't spend it on yourself, your family, or your friends, what would you do with it?"  A lot of people made the comment along the lines of "well that isn't a lot of money" and their ideas got smaller, heading down the directions of giving it to some random individual, maybe a homeless person or a child.  My idea, on the other hand, got bigger!  I figured $10 isn't really enough to get a whole community garden started, but the seeds of self-sufficiency could still be planted in the heads of people that need it the most.  My idea:  "I'd buy seeds for high yield plants like zucchini or tomatoes or ground cherries, find donations of five gallon buckets from bakeries or such, get a municipality to donate compost to fill the buckets, and get the seeds started. Then, after the last frost, I'd load up all the plants and take them down to a food pantry and start passing out container gardens, 2-3 plants per family, so that they would have enough food to eat later in the summer that they might be able to skip a week or two at the food pantry and maybe even have some to share with neighbors!"


My idea isn't really particularly original.  I was actually a recipient of a similar program last year, in which I received a tomato plant and a pepper plant, both of which did quite well in their containers and is a large part of why I expanded my gardening efforts so much from my original two 4x4 boxes into a large variety of containers last year, but among the responses to the original poster's question it was unique in that it turned that little $10 into something much, much larger. 

The two plants in the foreground in the picture are the ones I received from the "Big Seed" program last year.  The ex-kitty litter buckets that they were lovingly decorated by elementary school students as part of the project.  I treasure the containers, even though the plants have lived out their lives and I will be using them again this year!

The thing that impressed me the most about my answer is that I came up with it before my morning shower.  I usually don't think so well before my morning shower and, once I had my shower, I actually came up with a few reasons why I couldn't do this myself at this point at time, because, really, $10 isn't that much.  Economically, it should be quite feasible, even for someone as chronically broke as me!  However, I really don't have the space in my tiny single wide trailer for all those seedlings.  Nor am I familiar enough with the surrounding community to procure the buckets, soil, or even know where there is a food bank around here that might be open to joining for such a project.  (It also occurred to me that perhaps ground cherries wouldn't be such a good addition to such a project, since you need at least two plants so they can cross-pollinate in order to get a decent crop and most people who'd be receiving these plants probably wouldn't be familiar with ground cherries and so they wouldn't realize what a treasure they were receiving, but, really, that's a mere quibble, which is why I stuck it in a major run-on sentence in parentheses.  I also later realized that I left out the part about drilling holes in the buckets so they would have good drainage.  Anyhoo...)  I realized, however, that this would be a fantastic service project for a group such as a church, scout troop, or school that wanted to make a real difference in their community without having to spend a lot of money to do it.  So, I decided to blog about it, hoping that someone would "steal" my idea and put it in action (and, yes, I will be sharing this with my church as well).  If anyone does, please leave a comment here telling us about it or share it on my Facebook page.  I'd love to hear if this seed of an idea germinates into some positive change for the world, one pot at a time!