Reply #55: guerrilla gardening [View All]

[noamnety]

There is lots of public land that isn't watched all that closely. It doesn't take much to put a few jersulam artichokes into a secluded patch of a state park and let it thrive for years. Or quietly start tending a garden in the backyard of a foreclosed piece of land.

I was in a local nature preserve a few years ago with a ziploc bag and a paintbrush. One of the rangers stopped to ask what I was doing. They had a stand of pawpaw trees; I wanted the pollen from that to pollinate my own tree at home. It's not a tree that bees like so a lot of people do hand pollination of them. I was explaining this to the ranger and instead of kicking me out or letting me alone, he took me down to an area where nobody goes in the park and showed me where there was another stand of them. He said if I wanted I could pollinate those ones while I was there and come back in the fall with a backpack and harvest the fruit.

Most places I've lived, I've been able to forage a fair amount of food. In Germany it was berries and hazelnuts in the woods. In Washington it was berries again, and various things from the ocean. I didn't have a fishing pole, but I found some abandoned hooks and tangled fishing wire stuck on the pier. I untangled the abandoned line, tied a few pieces together, tied them to the hook, and was able to get fish to eat every night just by holding the fishing line with my bare hands. I didn't own a grill but I could usually find people on the beach who were grilling and when they'd leave, they'd still have hot coals and I could cook the fish on that. In California I upgraded to a fishing pole. I still didn't have a house, but I had a coleman camp stove and everything was cooked on that, in my one pan - a 50 cent "ez foil" pan from the grocery store that I just reused over and over. I had to wash it by rinsing it in the ocean, I didn't have running water, but I figured next time I cooked in it it would be sterilized. I lived on a crappy boat I bought for 3 thousand dollars. It was a lot up front but then I had no rent and no utilities. No car, no car insurance, no gas expenses. It was like camping, but longer term. I've also known some great people who were I suppose technically homeless, but lived at relief shelters volunteering for others. They got a free tent to sleep in where police wouldn't harass them, free meals, they did volunteer work, and they were also able to do part time work on their own in town.


In Ann Arbor I knew where there was a cherry tree I could raid on university property. Nobody else in our culture seems to do that anymore, if you can find a treasure like that you can normally take ownership of its crop. And I spent 10 bucks there for a 10x10 plot in a community garden.

Now I am doing better, I have a job and it seems fairly secure at least for now. But if I were doing that now I'd be checking the free section of craigslist a few times a day. If you need to replace a broken appliance, CL normally will have something that is used but functional for free if you can afford to have patience. I finally got rid of things this week from combining two households years ago - we had extras we didn't need. So local folks got a free blender, free hand mixer, free coffee pot, some clothes, and other things from me this week. When I have too much produce in my garden and can't keep up with picking or processing it I put that up free on CL as well. In return I've taken my fair share of free stuff as well - like all the cedar to build my raised beds. That was all free from someone's fence that was damaged in a storm, it was going to cost him 300 dollars to have someone haul it away for him so it saved both him and us a lot of money. I've even seen people offering hair cuts for free on CL.


And as always in response to posts like the OP, I'll add - use 211 (like 911 but for social needs, rather than police or EMS). If you have the service in your area that will take you to a united way volunteer who has a list of all the resources in your area, like free/low cost clinics, food banks, etc. They can direct you to what you need without you having to pull your hair out reinventing the wheel doing all that research yourself. Sorry to anyone who is tired of hearing me plug them, I just get the sense that not too many people are even aware that exists.