Brooklyn Gardeners Respond to Onerous Open Hours Mandate

This over the wire, posted by my good friend Jon Crow:

At Saturday’s Brooklyn Community Gardeners Coalition (BCGC)
meeting, we discussed the new Parks/GreenThumb mandate
increasing open hours from 10 to 20 hours. We broke down the
issue into the following categories and began listing our
thoughts and concerns.

PLEASE, read through these lists, then email back and
ADD YOUR THOUGHTS AND CONCERNS!!!

The final list will be provided to the NYCCGC to be included in
a joint letter from the combined city-wide garden coalitions.

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REASONS FOR INCREASING OPEN HOURS…

1) Public access
2) Attract potential new members
2) More opportunity to interact with community
4) End perception that gardens are private

WHAT MAKES INCREASING OPEN HOURS DIFFICULT…

1) Gardens exist in diverse communities with diverse needs and concerns
2) Most gardens can’t just be left unattended due to crime and safety issues (safety of
volunteers, theft of crops and tools…)
3) Staffing volunteers is a job in itself that takes time, skills and energy
4) Volunteers not available for a variety of reasons (age, health, employment, sense of
safety, weather, available daylight…)
5) Small gardens have less members available to staff open hours

WHAT GARDENERS COULD DO…

1) Make the garden more inviting (benches, chairs, picnic tables, gazebos…)
2) Plan more community activities (Potlucks, workshops, children’s events…)
3) Better inform the public of the volunteer opportunities available in each garden
4) Better display garden open hours
5) Better display how to become a new member
6) Post calendar of events
7) Place signboards on sidewalk welcoming visitors into the garden during open hours
Make community connections (schools, churches, community boards…)
9) Seek out letters of support

WHAT PARKS / GREENTHUMB COULD DO…

1) Recognize what makes Gardens different than Parks (mission, purpose, usage…)
2) Publicly appreciate the hard work of UNPAID Garden volunteers
3) Provide necessary training (community organizing, membership development,
leadership training…)
4) Educate the public that the gardens exist and that they’re for all the community to enjoy
(outreach campaign)
5) Promote the benefits of community gardening in our neighborhoods (promotional
campaigns, maps of gardens…)
6) Publicize community garden activities (Publicity campaign… ads, web notices, eblasts,
media campaign…
7) Create an annual Community Garden Day to promote awareness, membership,
visibility…
Increase event sponsorship, funding and assistance
9) Assist gardens in need by providing paid staffing or funding for staffing
10) Increase staffing for GreenThumb to provide increased outreach to gardens and their
communities
11) Provide credit for unposted open hours including winter maintenance, organizational
time…

Rooting for Harmony

I once heard John Daido Loori, the Zen teacher, remark that karma moves forward and it can also move backward. Cleaning up your act now affects the future. It also affects the past.

In 2002 I had a temporary gig as the event planner for the GreenThumb GrowTogether. GreenThumb is the city agency that administers its community gardening program. The GrowTogether is its annual conference. And it’s a large conference–a thousand attendees. The program features workshops, plenary speakers–the usual kind of thing. And the year’s t-shirt. The design changes every year. For the conference I helped to plan, we chose a design that showed two garden forks with wooden handles. The wooden handles spiraled around each other in an embrace, and sprouted green stems and leaves. The tagline we chose for the t-shirt was slyly subversive “Rooting for Harmony.” Slyly subversive because it was a reference to the Project Harmony Garden, which seems to be perpetually threatened. (A) because it’s in the center of rapidly gentrifying Harlem, and is facing heavy development pressure and (B) because a sliver of its land is privately owned.

I hadn’t really thought of that t-shirt for years. But last night on the subway enroute to a concert (Signal playing Steve Reich–absolutely stunning), a woman across from me was wearing that six-year old, eons ago t-shirt.

I had a political falling out with GreenThumb’s direct, Edie Stone. Things got really ugly around disagreements we had about some proposed legislation, and I basically helped engineer a rather smeary article about her in the Village Voice. Good way to kill a budding friendship. And a possible career working for the community gardening “establishment.” People didn’t trust me after that. I was already seen as a loose cannon, and now I was a treacherous loose cannon. Edie had hired me for the event planning job, and I repaid her by helping to plant nasty articles in the press. I didn’t write the article, so I can’t take all the blame for its snarly tone. But I do remember being gleeful when it came out. And as soon as the link on the Voice’s website went live, I posted it to several lists.

I’m not writing this to repair a relationship. I don’t expect Edie to ever read this. I am writing this to capture a memory. And to apologize to the universe. There must have been a kinder way to have handled that. I can’t say what that would have been. But it would have emanated from a more trusting, more respectful place within myself.

Sarah Palin Supports Brutal Aerial Hunting of Wolves

On a canoe trip last year in Manitoba, we camped on an island in the middle of a wilderness lake. I slept through it, but others in our party heard wolves howling from the shore. Even though I slept through it, if find it comforting—not scary—that they were there.

I find this chilling and sickening:

Soiled Hands

Welcome, whoever may have come over from FreeDigger, my old blog. I found my interest in that blog petered out and I had been very infrequently posting to it–maybe once every two months. I had staked out a stance and an intent, and found three years later that I had changed. I wanted to focus on community garden politics in NYC almost exclusively. While that’s still a vital interest of mine, I find my life and interests are much broader. I used the word ‘digger’ in the blog title, a reference of course to gardening but also to the Digger movements of 17th century England and 1960s San Francisco. While I don’t disavow my affinity for those movements, they just don’t speak to my current condition.

So, what is my current condition? Well, I moved from gentrified Park Slope to East Bushwick. I live with my lover, Juniper. I still belong to community gardens here, but I also have “my own” garden in front and in back of the building. I’ve deepened my meditation practice, and ponder a lot more the relationship between spirituality and political engagement. I work for a progressive foundation, and spend much of my day thinking about how to support grassroots community organizing, which is different than being actively engaged in it. And, like every now and then, I read a mystery novel or visit an art gallery.

So, I guess you could say that I’m starting this blog to be much more personal, and true to my character, a bit unfocussed. Welcome to my fuzzy world.