Enough said!
This ‘YOU CAN DO IT!’ shit needs to be -BACKED-.
I am all for the encouragement of urban gardening, but pretty pictures and platitudes aren’t enough. You need to be out there handing out dirt and seeds and containers, you need to be getting out there and building wheelchair-accessible raised community gardens and building seed libraries and showing people how to hang tomato plants off fire escapes and commandeer city land – and even THEN you don’t say ‘YOU CAN DO IT!’ you say ‘Hey, this is how to do it, if you want in.’
Telling people they can do it isn’t doing shit if you’re not actually showing them how and helping to make it possible.
Growing food instead of lawns is good, but can we PLEASE work on doing things to make it possible?
Maybe give people instructions on how to work with an/or fight their home owner’s association, how to appeal to a landlord, how to address local ordinances, and how to grow stealth food crops as ornamental plants in areas where food gardening is banned. Seriously, they will come bulldoze your shit and then bill you for it.
We need more posts instructing people how to guerrilla garden and found community gardens, and fewer posts saying ‘Grow food, not lawns!’
(Also we need to remember that some people will never be able to invest the money, time, and effort both physical and mental that it takes to have a garden, because they have personal care needs/care of others responsibilities/jobs/illnesses/physical disabilities/other shit to do/do not give a dull fuck about gardening and are perfectly happy with a patch of grass or even astroturf AND THAT IS OK TOO.)
