I have been reading up on the diggers and levellers lately what with all of this land-grabbing that is going on around the world. Living in an apartment I always have my eye on any bit of land that looks fertile or even just neglected. Gerrard Winstanley was one of the original land-redistribution activists in the Western tradition. He wrote many pamphlets, this is his most extensive one which gives his ideas of the basic problem in our world (buying and selling) and how we can create a better world for ourselves and our children. It is quite extensive and the whole thing can be viewed here. I have taken some of my favorite passages for you below:

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The 17th of April is the International Day of Peasant Struggle. On April 17 1997, after three months of protest for the defense of Mother Earth and for the cultivation of the coca leaf in Bolivia, seven indigenous peasants, including a child and its mother, were massacred. Today is the day, around the world people come together to network on how we can intensify the mobilization for the rights of peasants everywhere. This post is offered in memory of those who have and who are struggling for access to land.

I recently read On Guerrilla Gardening: The Why, What and How of Cultivating Neglected Public Space by Richard Reynolds. It is a beautiful book full of fantastic photos of guerrilla gardening around the world. There are a lot of helpful and practical hints, tips and suggestions as well as the history of guerrilla gardening around the world. This book is a great resource as well as a fun coffee-table book, not often do you find a practical coffee-table book like this one, I highly recommend you read the whole thing, but just to get you started here are some of my favorite passages from this fantastic book:

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Man is adequately equipped for all his true needs if he trusts his senses and develops them in such a way that they remain worthy of that trust.

-Goethe

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I first broke ground in Vancouver BC, on June 7th, 2009. For me this was a very symbolic act. This was the day I finally got the stamp in my passport that said I was an official resident of Canada. Living in an apartment I didn’t have a piece of ground of my own, but I had been scouting out the nearby possibilities for about a year and a half while waiting for my residency to come through.

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20+ Yarrow Stalk Garden Markers

Very simple, these yarrow stalks are so slender they won’t block any precious sunlight. Biodegradable with easily changed masking tape flags to label your seedlings.

I needed some markers for my seedlings and had these yarrow stalks on hand that I wild harvested from the pristine Catskills of New York, added a bit of masking tape and what do you know, very useful bio-degradable garden markers, excellent.

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Written for Healthy Options magazine October 2009.

It is unusual to find a vegetable that not only removes DDT from soil, but reduces the likelihood of getting emphysema or lung cancer for smokers, expels tapeworms and other parasites and is a focus of community and entertainment during Halloween. Pumpkins and winter squash do all this and more. Not only is the flesh of the pumpkin delicious and nutritious, but also it’s seeds and blossoms, in fact, in some places even the leaves are added to soup. This useful fruit is often overlooked and has the ability to create healing in both the Earth and our bodies. Pumpkins and winter squash come to us from Central and South America and were rapidly accepted around the world when introduced by Spanish and Portuguese traders. They were originally grown for the seeds as original varieties didn’t have much flesh.

Winter squash consist of many species within the Cucurbita genus, all of them cross-breed readily. They are different than summer squash in that they have thick, protective skin and a cavity that holds the seeds. Some of the more well known varieties include Butternut, Hubbard, Kabocha (Japanese pumpkin), Acorn, Spaghetti and Atlantic Giant. The ones with deeper orange color have particularly high levels of vitamin A in the form of beta carotene. Their thick skins are also particularly useful, allowing them to be stored for up to 6 months under the right conditions, without refrigeration. Pumpkins are also a good vegetable to buy if you are broke and can’t afford organic produce—conventionally mass-farmed winter squash use less pesticides or herbicides and are not on the hot-list of genetically modified organisms that have been injected into our food-web.

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We had a serious attack of spider mites. They started in the catnip and yarrow and somehow got to the choko and beans. They took the choko down in no time, fortunately it is a hardy plant and it has now grown back to where it was when the spider mites devoured it.

This was my first real run-in with spider mites, which are quite a common especially in container and greenhouse gardeing. I tried neem oil and washing the leaves off, but I think my problem was too advanced by the time I used these measures. I finally found a recipe for a light glue that is sprayed on the back of the leaves and smothers the mites. This has to be done every so often as the eggs will keep hatching. It seems to have finally put a stop to them and my beans are looking a bit better. I also gave them a dandelion tea because I thought it might help add some potassium to the soil and that is another thing beans can easily become deficient in if they are in containers.

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The revenge of the Bean Bandits and Pirate Tomatoes is upon us!

I finally found a good spot on one of the Greenways of Vancouver BC. No one was using it, it got good sun and was just by a sky-train and rail-road tracks so it seemed a perfect spot. There is a lot more space available in this area, although much of it is under the tracks and wouldn’t get any rain. It is a bit of a walk, but not too much, the ground is rocky so I need to get some fertilizer. More about the garden here.

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Vancouver City Council passed a motion in 2006 to encourage 2,010 new gardens by 2010. Now there are more than 40 community or resident-shared gardens with more than 1,700 garden plots and more on the way. There is a great brochure that the City of Vancouver has put out with a good map that shows great walking and bicycle tours of the various community gardens around the town. As it says on the back of the brochure:

Community gardens in Canada peaked during the World Wars. In 1943, there were over 50,000 Victory Garden plots in Greater Vancouver.

So we still have a ways to go to get back to that level of garden plots in the city, but there is tons of land available, and plenty of support for people to get out there and get gardening. More information can be found here.

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Food Security & Sustainability: For The Times Ahead by Harvest McCampbell, published by Bio Diverse Press in May 2008 arrived just in time.

This book is a level headed and comprehensive look at what is coming our way. Without fear-mongering and trying to get rich off of your fears, Harvest McCampbell provides a wealth of resources and practical steps that you can take to prepare for the transition that our world is gearing up for.

Harvest shares her vision of a Green World that her Grandmother passed down to her, and makes us consider how we would survive if we woke up one day in a world without asphalt or cars. In this book Harvest shares her answers to the question her Gram used to ask her when they were out in the woods gathering wild food and herbs.

“Maybe today, maybe when we get back to where we left the car, there will be no car, there will be no roads. Then what will we do Little One?”

In a few simple paragraphs, Harvest McCampbell filled my head with visions of the Green World her Gram spoke of and my heart with a secure feeling of hope. This book points to how we can each help each other to find our way through the mess we have made of things by working together with respect and confidence.

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