Therapy and defiance of planting: make gardens and forests, not war
April 11, 2016 11:56 AM   Subscribe

Back in 2011, Ron Finley took up gardening, planting tomatoes, peppers, chard, melons, squash, pumpkins, onions, broccoli, eggplant, celery, kale and herbs in front of his house in Los Angeles. He reclaimed a strip of useless, scrubby grass between the curb and the sidewalk along his property, except it wasn't permitted at that time, because local ordinances prohibited "overgrown vegetation" in such "parkways." But that didn't stop Ron, the guerilla gardener in South Central LA (YT/TED), who is still spreading his gospel of urban gardens. If you want practice some guerrilla gardening of your own, you can make and hurl seed bombs into vacant lots, which can be scaled up if you happen to have some aircraft and a lot more seed or even sapling bombs, you can really scale up your reforestation efforts.

Two years after Ron's first parkway garden, the streetside gardens popped up elsewhere in L.A., and were also cited. If you're in Los Angeles and want to join in urban gardening, Ron mentioned L.A. Green Grouns as the South L.A. group he works with to help others plant edible gardens.

Guerrilla gardening isn't new, nor are seed bombs. Liz Christy and the Green Guerilla group of NYC gets credit for the both.

If you want more information on aerial reforestation, here's a Google Groups thread with more links and pullquotes, which is the source of some links above the break.
posted by filthy light thief (13 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Sometimes people are good.
posted by sidereal at 12:31 PM on April 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Aerial reforestation is a fascinating idea, but it never seems to work out. Maybe Alamaro has eliminated the bugs and is the guy who will get millions of trees to thrive. I hope so. In any case, it seems like it should work better in places that are already more naturally congenial to trees, like India. (Although from the article it sounds like they just dropped seeds from helicopters and didn't use specially made seedling bombs like Alamaro's.)
posted by Kevin Street at 12:34 PM on April 11, 2016


Ursula Vernon had an excellent File770 rant about how Seed Bombs Don't Work.
posted by tavella at 12:55 PM on April 11, 2016 [15 favorites]


I'd very much like to do this in my own city. The post industrial mess of empty lots is overwhelmingly visible here. Would be nice to spruce them up. Too bad seeds are mad expensive.
posted by constantinescharity at 1:19 PM on April 11, 2016


Seeds aren't the problem; any area that is amenable to growing stuff by just tossing seeds on them likely has plants already growing there. If it's an empty lot and doesn't already have plants growing everywhere, then either a) you live in a desert, b) the soil is untenable for plants, or c) someone is mowing or poisoning the place. If there is water and soil, plants will come of their own accord.

The last link in my Vernon comment above has some useful suggestions about how to amend soil in dead zones, but any which way, it's going to be backbreaking work.
posted by tavella at 1:32 PM on April 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Every once in a while, I'll be parking in a residential area or Waze will shortcut me through one and I'll strike gold in a neighborhood where front-lawn gardens are legally and socially acceptable, and it thrills and frustrates me. If we're going to be watering residential (and commercial!) green space (which we do need, 100% xeriscaping would be an issue of its own), in a growing zone as fantastic as Los Angeles, let's do it with lettuce lawns and tomato terraces. I'd still gladly pay my lawn service crew to help with bed maintenance and irrigation systems and such.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:38 PM on April 11, 2016


See also: Adam Purple, guerrilla gardener and tender of the Lower East Side's Garden of Eden.

About whom there is, amazingly, still not an FPP.
posted by eclectist at 1:59 PM on April 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


Ursula Vernon had an excellent File770 rant about how Seed Bombs Don't Work.

And now I realize I should search for counter-examples when making posts.

Idiot error: above the break, "sampling bombs" should be "sapling bombs"
posted by filthy light thief at 2:12 PM on April 11, 2016


Don't feel bad! There's lot of great links in your post, it's not like guerrilla gardening can't be good, it just isn't going to happen just from tossing a seed bomb versus tending a plot.
posted by tavella at 2:27 PM on April 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


You could do it on a national scale, like Iceland.

(If you have awful compacted nutrientless soil, there is at least one fairly cheap and low-effort approach to rebuilding the soil: tile it with ruined strawbales and piss on them. There are social difficulties though.)
posted by clew at 4:38 PM on April 11, 2016 [3 favorites]


According to tavella's excellent link, it sounds like the biggest problem with vacant lots in an urban setting is soil compaction. Especially in yards where houses and buildings were razed by heavy machinery and some of the topsoil taken away. (As seems to be standard practice these days.) Maybe the best way to encourage plant growth there is to scatter some new soil in places where the slope is such that it can retain rainwater, like the low spots where basements used to be.
posted by Kevin Street at 6:05 PM on April 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


I remember Finley from a great interview he did on Joe Rogan's podcast. Excellent ideas and knowledge, and the concept of reclaiming ugly urban spaces for community gardens is such a cool idea.
posted by theorique at 2:54 AM on April 12, 2016


A form of tactical urbanism.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:58 PM on April 13, 2016


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