Ebony's Pearls

It felt strange not buying a dozen loaves of bread last night, and stranger still not getting up at 4:00 a.m. to make sandwiches and then take them out. I know that what I've decided to do instead is going to be more effective in the long run, but it still just feels weird to break a habit of a decade.

I was still up at 4:00 a.m. I went downstairs to play with my youngest's dogs. The old one is arthritic and getting cataracts and he may not be around much longer.

I heard today that my next youngest daughter is deploying out to Iraq in March, just as my youngest is coming back from there. Trading kids around the Middle East is a nerve-wracking game.

I spent some time down at the City Rescue Mission and Jesus House, and am working on what I will be doing as a charity in the future. I've had an offer from some really knowledgeable people about starting the Guerrilla Gardening among the homeless program I've been experimenting with this past year. It's sort of working, and maybe, if I push it harder, it will work better.

Guerrilla Gardening is sort of like community gardens, only not so formal and rigid in structure. Every community garden I've seen around here fails, gets over-run by weeds, and eventually gets abandoned. This isn't to say they all do, only the ones I've seen. I know there's a thriving one in Edmond that I haven't seen. I hear about it from a co-worker who volunteers at it.

To guerrilla garden, I have to change how I approach the homeless. Instead of it being a personal one-on-one encounter, it will be group work, which means cooperating with the shelters and places where the homeless hang out. It will be less a peer relationship and more a teacher/student relationship. I'm much better at peer relationships than teacher/student.

I will be teaching them wildcrafting, basic gardening techniques, and giving away vegetable seeds and seedlings. We'll be searching out abandoned niches of land and planting the seeds and plants there until the land is taken for other things. The "gardens" will be as mobile and transient as the people planting and using them will be.

And I'll have to be much more publicly active than I have been - getting permission from the businesses to use their wastelands as transient gardens, getting variances from the city to allow the gardens to exist in the larger places, standing up before groups of people not just to teach them how and why to guerrilla garden, but also giving speeches to upstanding citizens explaining to them why guerrilla gardening is better than community gardens for the homeless population. And I have to prepare myself for large amounts of failure - when the city sprays pesticides on the waste-gardens, making the food in it inedible, when the Oklahoma heat kills the plants for lack of water and shade - or perhaps not enough sun, but still a lack of water and excess heat. There will be people who oppose it just because they can, and others who will oppose it because they think it's stupid and a waste of time, and others who will oppose it because it "increases crime" (although I can't imagine how it would do so, there are people who think any action taken to assist the poor and homeless will increase crime. I think they would be happy only if we either imprisoned all the homeless and poor or killed them off.), and others will protest it because it "takes away valuable resources from those who work for a living and pay taxes", and I'm sure there will be other reasons. Doing Sandwich Saturdays, I didn't have to face the public. I just made the sandwiches and gave them away and that was it. Pretty simple. But with guerrilla gardening, I have to face the public.

Thing is, I'm pretty convinced that food is important. Everyone deserves to eat, no matter how stupid they behaved or what they did. I believe we should make food available to everyone. We aren't a heavily agrarian society anymore, but the gleaning laws are still there on the books in many communities. There just aren't the crops around for people to glean from. So what I'm proposing with the guerrilla gardening is an alternate interpretation of the gleaning laws.

OK - it's wildly stretching the meaning of the gleaning laws.

But - it will mean food for more people. They'll just have to exert themselves a bit for that food, and they'll have to be patient as it ripens. It's not a quick fix, but it will be (maybe, eventually) a long term fix. When we have tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, radishes, sweet peas, green beans, lettuces, malabar spinach, passionflowers, squash and pumpkin vines, poke, rocket, dandelions, sorrel, purslane, oxalis, cucumbers, peppers, melons, sunflowers, okra, tepary beans, asparagus, cardoons, onions, leeks, edible bamboo, peanuts, turnips, strawberries, brambleberries, and melons growing in vacant lots and waste spaces available for anyone to tend and harvest, there will be food for the hungry - and they'll have the dignity of feeding themselves. If people who planted fruit and nut trees in their front yards would allow the fallen fruits to be harvested by anyone (I know several people in my neighborhood who have peach trees plated near the street and they don't harvest the fruit themselves, nor do they allow anyone else to - the fruit just falls to the ground and rots because there's far more than the wild animals can eat), and if waste areas could be planted with fruit and nut and other useful, edible trees, and anyone could harvest from them, that would also help. Food banks could have volunteer canning nights to can the harvests to use in feeding the homeless throughout the year, supplementing their donations. The homeless and hungry could eat whatwas in season fresh from the plants.

It's a crazy dream. I know. And there will be nay-sayers and people actively working to stop this (I haven't a clue what they hope to gain from being antagonistic, but I've already met a few of them in working towards developing this idea - and if they're that antagonistic when it's just a nebulous idea, they're probably going to be worse when I start making it happen more than I already have). Why yes, those sunflowers growing in the medians were planted by me. My first step in providing guerrilla food - sunflower seeds to eat in the summer and fall and sunchoke roots to eat throughout the winter. Those cattails growing in the ditch where no cattails grew before? Probably me. I'm not going to claim all the edible plants springing up in strange and new places, but some of them are by me. I've been sort of doing this aimlessly for the past 7 or 8 years, and it's only in the last year that I've started getting some direction on doing this.

I'll do more volunteer work at the homeless shelters in order to make the deeper connections with the organizations and seek their help in doing this type of guerrilla gardening, and get places to teach the homeless how to garden for themselves, and how to wildcraft and tend and harvest the fruits of everyone's labor and benign neglect.

No one should ever go hungry without choice.