2562 Community gardens feed the community

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Isaac Asimov: Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

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Quick note. I'm meeting Piper for lunch on the riverside patio of the Rhinecliff Hotel, and then meeting The Man later this afternoon, so I need to get moving.

I caught the first few minutes of Martha Stewart before I changed the channel. She was talking about feeding your family from vegetable gardens - in your back yard (shot of her enormous garden), patio containers (shot of a lonely tomato plant surrounded by herbs), or a community garden (shot of fenced area with neat raised beds).

Ex#2 and I participated in a community garden effort when Daughter was a toddler and we lived near Gaithersburg, MD. We worked hard, preparing the soil, fertilizing, weeding, picking insects, and although our section was the most healthy and productive, we never got to eat anything from our plants. There were apparently others in the neighborhood who considered it a food bank, and everytime I went to check and hoped to gather, our produce had been stripped.

I don't see how a community garden, the type where each person has a plot and grows and picks their own choice of plants, can possibly work without a 24-hour armed guard, and checking of ids against plots.

When I lived in Highland, I briefly belonged to a garden co-op. Designated people tended the garden, and members could go and pick up a bag every week containing whatever was ready that week. That didn't work for Daughter and me, because it wasn't our choice of produce, and we could eat only so many turnips and pumpkins per week.

I'm trying this. Whether it look right or not will depend on Blogger's formatting, but here goes:
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(¸.·´ (¸.·´ * Silk

Edit: Nah. Blogger removed some of the necessary blanks. Suggestions? What I need is a unprinted character in the bottom line to replace the blanks, or a different font that doesn't close up the spaces. ???