Or, at least, the uglier parts of it.

If you haven’t given any thought to becoming a Guerilla Gardener or, if you have thought about it but simply haven’t taken action, you really owe it to yourself to see how much beauty one guy with buck teeth has brought to Zurich, Switzerland.

http://www.maurice-maggi.ch/blumengraffiti/guerilla-gardening/ggtv-guerrilla-gardener-maurice-maggi-zurich/

There are two videos at the above link. Watch them in succession and then ask yourself if you don’t know of some locations in your neighborhood that could use some cheering up.

Maggi simply gets the seed below the surface, hiding it from birds and insects. He doesn’t water it. He doesn’t fertilize it … nature handles that just fine. It would appear that he plants hollyhocks and poppy’s together … both can tolerate fairly dry conditions.

He used a term that I was unfamiliar with: biotope. I’ve looked it up for my benefit and passed it along for yours. This definition comes from Wikipedia; YMMV.

Biotope is an area of uniform environmental conditions providing a living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals. Biotope is almost synonymous with the term habitat, but while the subject of a habitat is a species or a population, the subject of a biotope is a biological community.

^{I Stumbled this a few minutes ago … I hope it takes off. If you have a way to help it along, please do so.}

^{Here’s my review in Stumble:}

“Guerilla gardening means the planting of public spaces without permission. Maurice Maggi has been during this in Zurich for ~20 years. He’s the source of the hollyhocks that beautify that city. Now, do your part in YOUR city. For more info, Google for "guerilla gardening".”

This is not what being self-sufficient is all about.

With unemployment benefits running out for a staggeringly huge number of people in the United States and elsewhere, it looks to be a long, cold, winter. For many, it will be a hungry one, too.

But it didn’t have to be that way this year and it doesn’t have to be that way next year.

If you have a backyard, or just know of an undisturbed place in an alley or alongside the road, you can grow enough food to feed at least two people, probably more. If you add in the front yard, you can likely feed more people than you can house. If you live in the warmer parts of the world (roughly 40-45 deg. north and south latitude and some areas outside of that warmed by coastal currents or favorable winds) you can plant and harvest all year around. Sometimes seeds, sometimes bulbs, sometimes plants, depending on the local weather patterns. But you can plant. And, if you can plant, tend, reap and prepare, you can eat.

This is the first post of a multi-part series (with the first 8 parts essentially complete) and marks a new, more aggressive, editorial direction. For quite some time now I’ve not posted much of anything because I didn’t like the ‘me too’ direction I had started out in. I think I wrote a pretty good series about growing tomatoes – I certainly had fun doing the artwork – and my readers seemed to like the slug article, but there are tons of nearly identical ‘de rigueur’ articles on the internet. Until fresh research turns up something startling, there just isn’t anything left to write on these topics. (Read the slug article – I did stumble on something new that works surprisingly well.) Although I am not removing those posts and, indeed, I plan to add to them from time to time, I’m taking a new direction.

Gardening is often seen as this sort of passive thing that people who like vegetables or pansies do … a harmless pastime, like painting by number, for those with no real talent or drive.

I don’t think so … I never have thought so, but, like most gardeners, I didn’t know how to put my feelings into words before so I just put my passion into the soil. Well, as you’ll see by the writing that follows, I’ve found the words.

– Bill

You are probably here because you agree that organic food is a good idea. In that case, you might might be interested in this 5:47 radio link.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

You may also be interested in knowing that Ireland is now officially and completely GMO free. Even so-called ‘trial fields’ (which end up contaminating the surrounding fields as their pollen spreads) are no longer permitted. This is a HUGE victory … to have even ONE government stand up to big agri-business instead of cowering before it, as the US, Canadian and British governments have.

Obama betrayed us all in his appointment of a representative of big-ag as our nations ag representative … but what else are we to expect? The guy he appointed is associated with the agribusiness lobbying group that started the “groundswell” letter writing campaign against the Whitehouse organic garden. Obama is too much of a politician, and not enough of a man, to stand up to these folks … but it looks like the Irish are up to the task.

If you know what you are looking for, you can freely and safely harvest the places planted by nature and ignored, shunned or forgotten by man. It’s a disquieting thought to note that most major cities only have enough food reserves for 3-4 days. After that, the warehouses will be as empty as the store shelves. But, even in the winter, you can shift the odds of surviving in your favor just by knowing the difference between what will fill you and what will kill you.

To that end, my wife and I have begun taking classes in edible plant identification offered by the University of Michigan (USA) as part of their adult education program. We intend to learn food foraging.

Money is not the issue. Quite the contrary: for the moment, at least, we are able to buy enough to keep us fat and make us fatter. But it is possible that there may come a day when all the money in the world couldn’t buy a good, square, meal. Food politics and the trend toward specialization and industrialization have left many of us unable to fend for ourselves without an electric can opener and a microwave oven nearby. Yet, only a generation or two ago, these didn’t exist and mankind fed itself just fine without them.

The wild foods that fed our ancestors still grow wild … but most of us couldn’t identify enough of them to survive, much less thrive. 

You don’t have to become a Euell Gibbons, but you’ll be glad that someone did. Ever notice mushrooms popping up on the lawns you pass or maybe a little higher up on tree trunks? A lot of them are of the edible sort. While you definitely want to make certain you know  how to identify the edible varieties, in season (each has its own), they can often be had for no more effort than a casual walk around the block with a paper bag in your pocket.

Many, if not all, major cities have tangled back alleys and more vacant lots than occupied. Despite massive unemployment, no one, NO ONE, plants anything there. No one has put fertilizer there, ever. And no one bothers with weed killers, either. Whatever you find or grow there qualifies as ‘organic’. Think about that … if you don’t apply poisons to the food, there won’t be any. Some years ago my wife and I stopped at a motel near Manistee, MI on our way to camp at Sleeping Bear Dunes and see Grand Traverse Bay. Spying a restaurant not far away, we elected to walk to dinner. Our conversation had turned to foraging when, almost as if to make the point, we stumbled upon a stand of asparagus just a little past the cutting stage. It was maybe 5 feet off a busy highway and, had we arrived a few days earlier, would have provided more than enough for a meal for two.

I have a super-secret stash of dandelions that I discovered in my alley. They are in a shady spot and don’t seem to ever bloom. I’ve been eating from that stash for the past 9 years. Dandelions taste great and are full of the vitamins, minerals and fiber your body needs. Yet, most people just walk past them or, worse yet, spend good money and hard sweat to get rid of them. I just paid $1.09 yesterday for about a handful, grown in Mexico. This spring I’ll get them fresher and free. I’m not knocking Mexico or its hard-working citizens, and $1.09 seemed a reasonable price for what I got; but food shipped 3,000 miles can never be as fresh or inexpensive as food hand-carried 50 yards. Unless you grow your own food, you are forced to pay for your dinner to travel across entire continents, and even wing it over oceans just to arrive, somewhat the worse for wear, on your plate.

On a happier note: at least food doesn’t have to deal with a TSA pat-down.

I was checking Google for some of the keywords I want to rank for and was tickled to find that this blog is on the front page for multiple keywords multiple times. That, as any blogger will tell you, is the sweet smell of success! So I called Mrs. Bill in and we had a good laugh, feeling somewhat giddy about those results.  However, while I was at it, I decided to look at one of the blogs that ranked with me.

Wow, did I ever get my eyes opened.

I was stunned to find that the discussion of gardening activism has only two viewpoints: “The Milquetoasts” staying quietly at home while tending a few pansies and “Grub & Snapdragon Alphatrowel” set to change the world overnight: by force, if need be. There didn’t seem to be a middle-ground perspective. In this case, the debate developed around the disputes regarding global climate change. I’ll agree that this is an interesting problem, but I won’t agree that this should be the central focus of gardening activists. The problem with this polarity is that most of us occupy a middle ground, finding it defensible and a firm base from which to extend our reach. One. Garden. At. A. Time.

What good does it do to fight un-winnable battles while neglecting the victories that are actually within our grasp? Global warming is just one of these un-winnable battles. Think for a moment and you will uncover others, such as off-shore oil drilling or the use of chemical fertilizers that has created a vast dead-zone at the mouth of the Mississippi. It takes big resources to fight big enemies.

What about those of us who want food independence for ourselves and to turn our neighbors on to this quiet revolution? We can’t stop the UN … or the WTO … they’ve got more bullets than we have seeds. But we can render their policies as they affect our dinner table moot.

That’s right: we can stop them at the fork and that is a victory that the global-warming mongers and nay-sayers can never win. To the extent their focus has been blunted and deflected into empty debates, their power to cause positive change has been frittered away. Meanwhile, the real movers and shakers continue silently along the paths of their original agendas.

Carbon sequestration? That seems to be the buzz-word du jour with the climate change crowd. The whole argument centers around the question of CO2 … its effects and its sources. No one seems to have a problem with the two molecules of Oxygen, lots of people object to that single liberated molecule of carbon. Well, here’s a fact that can’t be argued: Every gardener who ever turned garden or animal waste back into the soil sequestered carbon; sometimes a surprisingly large amount of it. It isn’t unusual for a single gardener to make a ton or more of compost in one season and to turn it back into the soil at the start of the next. Whether the purpose in so doing is to enrich the soil, reduce the load on garbage dumps or to sequester carbon willy-nilly is irrelevant. The point is that returning nutrients to the soil has always been and will always be a net positive for the humans who inhabit this tiny rock with its microscopic layer of breathable air and its limited habitable zones.

Can’t wrap your head around sequestration? Try this out: “The average conventional produce item travels 1,500 miles, using, if shipped by tractor-trailer, one gallon of fossil fuel per hundred pounds.”

To sequester the stuff means to pull it back out of the atmosphere and tuck it away somewhere safe for a while. But, to grow food locally means not putting the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to begin with.

That’s my brand of garden activism. Simply learn what the right things to do are … and do them. Over, and over again.

You don’t have to stick your neck out to be a garden activist or engage in full-on food politics to earn some sort of street cred with me. It’s enough if you can plant a few seeds, put back a few jars and tuck some compost back into the soil for next year. Anything beyond that is gravy.

I pass out bonus points like the government passes out tax shelters for the rich if you teach one or more in the current generation of youth why and how to do this. Let them preserve, by whatever means are suitable, some food for their families. It will stop being theory and start being valuable.

So, whatever level you can contribute at is good. Keep those pansies growing (dig some compost or manure in around the roots, eh?), keep the heat on the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, the EPA and all the rest of the alphabet soup of government and quasi-government agencies. Hold their toes to a rip-roaring fire if you can. Or just quietly get things organized for the next nice day in your garden.

It’s all good.

– Bill