Demonstrating Ultra Low Cost, Easy, Fast, Cheap, Self-Made Housing, Edible Landscaping, and Renewable Energy, Cont’d., Independence Day

Brenda Barnes, President
Home-Grown Food Network, Inc. July 4, 2009
North Palm Springs-Joshua Tree, California

I’m writing about another new phase in our under-$20,000, easy, fast, cheap, self-made housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy project. We settled the case against the mobile home park, as I wrote about June 6, 2009.
Since then, we moved as much as we could in the time we had of the voluminous stuff we had inside the house outside, so we could move it on to new sites in the next 60 days after June 22, 2009. In the time since then, only 12 days, we’ve bought one RV to be able to travel around from site to site and are close to buying another one to leave most of the time and getting the septic tank put in so we can stay when we need to supervising and doing the development work at another site the charity owns.
That’s been an interesting process. One of the sites is a commercial 5-acre parcel in the City of Desert Hot Springs (adjacent to North Palm Springs where we’ve been located). The other is 2.5 acres residential (zoned rural living), located in the County of San Bernardino, about 20 miles from the DHS site.
Peter was going to write up what happened if we applied for permits to do the same development in both places, as far as commercial and residential development would be compatible given the two zoning laws, at the same time. His masters’ thesis in urban planning at Cambridge was on the effect of local zoning and planning processes on development, a comparative study between Ireland and Norway. This seemed to be a logical extension and update of that, and maybe he could get a research grant and/or get his Ph.D. We’re going to do the developments anyway, and we need to keep track of what happens to us for blogs and to keep justifying HGFN’s existence as a 501(c)(3) charity, so it looked logical to do an academic study, too.
My hypothesis on that—based on the lifelong research of Professor Lawrence Hagman, whom I had for an urban planning and law seminar in my last year at UCLA School of Law—was that getting permits in a city would be more expensive, slower, and ultimately more difficult than it would be in a county. Professor Hagman says every layer of government becomes more oppressive, duplicative, and expensive than the one above it. He says people put in a more local government because they think the layer they have at the time is too far away and unresponsive to some particular concern they have, like gays in the 70s in West Hollywood thinking the County of Los Angeles sheriffs were discriminating against them on Santa Monica Blvd. So people put in a city or town government to be in their control on that issue. It may work on the one issue. I haven’t heard of City of West Hollywood police discriminating against gays. But on myriad other issues—and as time goes on and the people who cared about the one issue get less involved in watching what the new government is doing, and in many cases there really isn’t enough legitimate things for yet another government to do–government expands and becomes intrusive in all sorts of things people used to manage for themselves. Besides, the local people who get elected and appointed to things never held office before, so there’s the aspect of being amateurs. Ironically, being local turns out to be the worst nightmare. Sarah Palin, after all, got elected mayor of Wasilla, Alaska because there wasn’t anyone else who wanted to be on the city council and she just pushed her way in once she got elected. Totally unqualified, ignorant, uninformed local people enjoy having power over their bothersome neighbors and then think because they can see Russia they’re qualified to control those neighbors, too.
Boy, was I wrong! It turns out to be impossible in the city, incredibly easy and free in the county. Cities may be oppressive, but they’re expensive and slow.
If I wrote the details, you’d think I was making them up. The City makes people have permits to move or build the smallest building, even a doghouse, into the city, and the permit fees, payable in cash in advance and kept whether or not the permit is granted, are over $5,000. The last time we turned in a plan, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING happened for TWO YEARS.
By contrast, in the county anything allowed in the zone can be put in without a permit. No cost, no delay, absolute certainty. Imagine!
One thing I found out while researching this is that 78% of the commercial land in the City of Desert Hot Springs is vacant. No wonder! If there is land 20 miles away where the government is governing the largest county on the planet and does not feel the need to supervise or collect a fee for every move a citizen makes—much less being able to—why would a developer bother with Desert Hot Springs?
Amazing what one learns when one takes action. It’s the Law of Action. See The Secret. I’ll let you know how these actions turn out, and what our adjustments from those outcomes are. What an exciting life.
– 30 –

Gardening for renters

Starting out from scratch with a garden is an exciting prospect as Stephanie Paige Ogburn recently wrote. But what if you’re a renter, and you need to convince your landlord that “your garden to be” is not going to end up a mess? Convincing a reluctant landlord to allow you to dig up part of the yard to put in a garden is tough. To prove your gardening skills, tell your landlord about training and classes you have taken, and show photos of your past gardens. (more tips)
Try not to get too emotional about your past gardening experiences unless your landlord is a gardening enthusiast. If so, you can tell your favorite stories about how much you loved the shade in your garden on hot summer days and how proud you were of the color and energy that you were responsible for allowing the earth to introduce into your life. Observe your landlord’s reactions to these stories. Most gardening enthusiasts will give you a free rein about how you go about creating your garden. However some landlords might have special rules about some designs, like what artifacts they don’t like in a garden-such as molded plastic pink flamingos, to mention an extreme example!

It’s tough on renters who want to have a garden but can’t. Interestingly, guerrilla gardening is on the increase. Stories abound about people of all age groups who will do almost anything to get a space to grow their favorite flowers and/or food in. I like this one about the lady in Paris who just got up and started being a guerrilla gardener at 71! The Los Angeles Times calls them “free range tillers”!

Home Grown Food Network is making friends with gardeners everywhere. We have plans to create gardens where an allotment type of garden sharing can occur on land owned by HGFN. Those plans are taking time to come to fruition because of zoning restrictions on the sites we have earmarked for this use. As we wait, we are excited by the growing network of gardeners springing up everywhere around us. We will not discriminate against any of them based on whether they own the land they garden on or not. Growing food and flowers is an ageless joy, and that is the wonderful human experience which we want to promote.

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network

Demonstrating Ultra Low Cost, Easy, Fast, Cheap, Self-Made Housing, Edible Landscaping, and Renewable Energy

June 6, 2009

I’m writing about a new phase in our under-$20,000, easy, fast, cheap, self-made housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy project. We settled the case against the mobile home park.
That’s so hard to believe. I’d been working on that over three years when we agreed to settle. It would have been impossible if we had looked at what three years’ work is worth, or how do we get the demonstration we have been working for all this time, or how do we make an example of the %^&amb;*(s we have been dealing with, or other things we talked about all this time. Instead, Peter and I worked for about a week at changing our thinking to what we would do now with a certain amount of money if we were finished working on this case. It was so hard, and mainly I at first. When we seriously started considering it, Peter said he felt as if he’d been kicked in the head. I understood. I too had so much trouble with a feeling of loss.
What I came to was this year things are different from last year, so I had to like build a wall in my mind hiding everything I thought last year from consideration. Obama has stimulus programs, there are deflated industries where there are all kinds of resources, and there are sources of information like the Internet, which we can take advantage of if we stop looking at the past.
So I started listing what we would spend settlement money they were offering for. We have to pay back some people who supported us through this. Once again, if we tried to pay them as we thought we would be able to if we finished the case, there wouldn’t be nearly enough money. It would be impossible to do even that, much less start something else. So we figured out how we could pay them back over a few years if we started projects that made money. Those include an energy farm at the Home-Grown Food Network property in Desert Hot Springs. That is possible only because of the stimulus program and progress financing such projects over the last few years. Seeing how it worked in Germany really inspired me. People rent neighbors’ roofs to put solar panels on them!
There still wasn’t enough money, so we told them a higher amount. They didn’t come up that high, but we figured again, if there could be any way to accomplish all we’d need to with only that much. Still there wasn’t, but we talked a lot of things over with our family and friends and kept looking for ideas on the Internet. Eventually the Park came up a little more, and we were convinced we could do enough with that with this forward-looking attitude we had developed, we should do it. So we did.
Another thing that helped is another group from our past has sued us in the last few months, and devoting my energies to that case should result in much more money than devoting more to this one ever could have. Plus I really couldn’t do both. Looking back over the past few years, I see each case ends up paying six or seven times as much as the last one. If I devote myself to this new case and that holds, there will be enough money to pay for the time I put into this last case, after all. But the main thing was, there is enough money now from this settlement to do projects Board members wanted to do, and if we are relieved of having to work on the case, the money is enough to get started.
So we’re moving. One of the things I learned from this new case and the last one is to NEVER use a home address on anything, now that it ends up being published on the Internet by people who are malicious. So I’m not saying precisely where we are moving, but it is in this same area. Edible landscaping, renewable energy, and more under-$20,000 house demonstrations are in the works. We’ll have video and pictures of our progress, and some day when it is far enough along that we can live in safety and have an actual demonstration site as well, we will do that too.
We’re living and learning, looking forward to showing you much more as we go along.

Brenda Barnes, President Home-Grown Food Network, Inc.
– 30 –

UFO lands in Los Angeles?

I wrote earlier this year about how land use planners participate in a professional conspiracy to prevent a solution to the problem of homelessness (read the blog here). I repeat my direction in that post to “Go to any city planning commission meeting right now and you will hear planners act as surprised to find homelessness on their doorstep as if they found aliens disembarking from a newly arrived space ship”. If you cannot get to a city planning commission meeting watch the CNN video on “The (latest) Big Find of Homeless” people. (watch the video here). The video describes how an area under an I 10 overpass in Los Angeles had been converted into a shelter by a community of homeless people and was now being cleared by the California State Highway Agency, Cal Trans. One of the homeless people, a woman named “Mib”, while watching the workers shredding all (belongings of homeless campers) they found under the overpass as if it were from outer space, bursts into tears, saying “all this stuff is just here”with the implication that it was just what people anywhere need to live-bedding, mattresses, and food!! She also said that “we’re not even recognized, we’re just swept under the carpet like trash”. That echoes the truth, sometimes whispered in land use planning circles nowadays, that proper planning is an anti-poor practice based on the goal “Move out the trash to make the city clean and green”. Up until the World Planners Conference in 2006 this goal was never even mentioned, because the word trash is being used to refer to the poor. Now, since the adoption of the Reinventing Planning resolution (more) at that conference, this goal is only whispered. You will rarely hear it spoken out loud, and certainly never at a planning commission meeting.

It’s not only in California that you will find homeless encampments hidden along freeways and bridges. Freeways everywhere provide the thread beside or under which homeless camps can “be found”. (more).

For the record, freeways are not the only place you will find homeless camps. In fact individuals who have as a primary residence any public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings abound throughout the USA, as they do throughout the world.

So why is helping the homeless with housing so difficult? It seems to be a nobrainer. There is a clue in the tone of journalists reporting on the homeless people being “found” throughout the country. They seem to insinuate that housing is the last thing the homeless need! Nope- public opinion wants to “clean them up”, “stop them reading pornography”, and “stop them ‘probably’ using drugs”. In fact reporters on the Los Angeles “find of the homeless under the freeway” highlighted the evidence they found of “drug use” and “pornography”. That was after they had barged in unannounced on the camp. I guess it did not occur to them that if they invaded the privacy of any housed person they might find similar evidences. Only the poor are held up to ridicule for behavioral nuances that are tolerated everywhere in society. (more). Instead of being offered an opportunity to house themselves, they are judged, and then swept away like trash!

In Home Grown Food Network, through the many interactions we have had with people of all ages and professional backgrounds, we are discovering that most human beings have in mind a few shreds of the happiness that comes from having a home. Every human being can create a shelter when given access to the land and simple building resources to do so. That’s the real message of the “discovery of homeless encampments”. Instead of responding as if we had just found aliens in our midst we should be providing sites and utilities for them to build on.

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network.

A Garden of Your Own

Home Grown Food Network’s Ultra Low Cost House Demonstration at Desert Hot Springs, California, is using a corner of the East Yard to demonstrate that you can grow potatoes in recycled garbage bags. The demo area is in the corner as far away from prying cameras as we can manage, and near a source of leaves and twigs needed to supply the potatoes with a medium to grow in. The roadrunners that adopted the yard as their base come and take a twig or two each every day, but we keep it stocked up and the potatoes are coming along nicely.

The East Yard is emerging as a self contained place. Here, individual visitors can view the development of the gazebo as a seedling start area and then sit to enjoy an iced tea in shade and seclusion inside the front gate. Just last week two visitors were commenting on how the presence of our cement mixer in the yard added a touch of authenticity to the “work in progress” aspect of the project. The mixer is still in use, and is not, as the Park Management had called it, “clutter“. We had a fun discussion on how to creatively use what was in the yard to camouflage the mixer for occasions when we have visitors and, thanks to our privacy, our visitors felt confident enough to actually experiment with some of their own camouflage ideas! Including dressing it up as a scarecrow!

While visiting this project, people of all ages seem inclined to talk about how gardening in a private space provides a soothing environment that releases tension, engages the senses, provokes curiosity and invites interaction with nature. Gardening is well known to be a fun inter-generational activity during which the younger people learn some tried-and-true gardening activities. And we are discovering that all age groups interpret the clearly private space provided by our Ultra Low Cost Housing Demonstration as an invitation to feel free to relax and get creative! Even to go so far as to invent ways to dress up a cement mixer! Just for fun!

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network

Grocery Gaps

The number of people living in what health experts have called a ‘food desert’—an urban area with few supermarkets and, therefore, limited access to cheap, healthful food- is on the increase. I wrote about this last year when I experienced it myself during a vacation in Escondido, but normally living within a two mile round trip of a Stater Bros supermarket as we do, we are not in a ‘food desert’. Food deserts are caused by the increase in distances separating family homes from the sources of fresh groceries, the “grocery gap”. In any “food desert neighborhood” it is easier to buy beer or twinkies than tomatoes or lettuce.

What causes the grocery gap? Big grocery stores, with their aisles of fresh produce, relying on the volume of food they sell at razor thin profit margins locating each store to reach the maximum number of shoppers, are the cause. But these companies are not likely to change that tendency. They do not care that the grocery gap becomes a transportation gap too. The fact that their customers are forced to travel a distance from another part of town to get a head of lettuce, because their small local convenience store has no lettuce, is not relevant to their business goals!

So if the stores do not care, who does? The government?
In the annual survey of food security, ( a euphemistic term for hunger), the only questions are about anxiety that the household budget is inadequate to buy enough food; inadequacy in the quantity or quality of food eaten by adults and children in the household; and instances of reduced food intake or consequences of reduced food intake for adults and for children. The annual survey never mentions the grocery gap!

In February 2009, SNAP/Food Stamp participation was 32,554,795 people, the highest participation level on record.(more) and more than 36.2 million people in U.S. households face a constant struggle against hunger. (More data on hunger in the USA here)

Officialdom declares that “the mental and physical changes that accompany inadequate food intakes can have harmful effects on learning, development, productivity, physical and psychological health, and family life”. Authorities all over the world maintain that the ability to obtain enough food for an active, healthy life is the most basic of human needs. And having said that, authorities “have” to stop.

At Home-Grown Food Network we are creating a focus for people to come together and share their awareness of their ability to obtain enough food. Grocery gaps and institutional failures, including anti-poor city planning practices, starve people, not of food, but of the necessary resources and freedoms to grow their own food. These planning practices emerged at a time when hunger was not a national problem. Now that millions and millions are hungry, isn’t it about time we created zoning ordinances that allowed edible landscaping in cities and suburbs? Then, instead of playing victim to where giant supermarkets choose to build their stores, people will unleash their own innate ability to obtain enough food by growing it themselves as individuals,or as members of neighborhood gardening groups, or as participants in community wide gardening movements!

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network

Plastics

Remember this dialogue in The Graduate (1967)?

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin (played by Dustin Hoffman): Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?

( more quotes from the movie)

Back when The Graduate was first released, plastics were mysterious, and to me, then a business studies undergraduate, it was plausible that they would yield a promising business career, if not in Ireland, certainly in America! Now after over 40 years of development, plastics have given us bulletproof vests, credit cards, slinky spandex pants, and have led to breakthroughs in medicine, aerospace engineering, and computer science.

But now it seems everyone is about to collapse into a “wrist slittlingly depressed” mood because the flaw with plastics is that they last and last, even when we want them to disappear! Solutions besides wrist slitting please? Anyone? Anywhere?

When we were in Ireland last, we were surprised to be told at the checkout in Spar at The Glebe in Donegal that we would have to pay for plastic bags. After that we always brought reusable shopping bags with us when we went grocery shopping there! Ireland calls this charge on plastic shopping bags at checkouts a “Plastax”. An awareness of plastics in the environment has been created by the charge (more) Instead of being filled with gloom about plastics in landfills and in the ocean, the Irish have begun to get interested in reducing the amount of plastic that they themselves throw away. And recycling has been added to the already long list of topics which you can bring up “for a chat” by the fireside or over a pint of Guinness!

Recycling plastic is so necessary and at the same time provides endless opportunities for being creative. I saw a dog on a leash made of plastic bags two days ago in Desert Hot Springs. OK, I must admit I thought that that was a bit extreme, but why not do that? At Home Grown Food Network we are growing potatoes in recycled garbage bags! Air Bear, is an example of Garbage Bag Sculpture (watch video here). And you can find at least 20 ways to re-use plastic bags over and over again here.

I have not even touched on reusing plastic containers such as milk or yogurt cartons. The gardening trend is to re-use them in the yard, especially in areas where water is scarce, and ideas abound for doing so creatively. As a word of caution here, Home-Grown Food Network has discovered that this could be more difficult for low income people in an urban environment. Low income people frequently get discriminated against for being untidy when they use recycled materials in their yards (more).

I planted six new tomato plants today in tins that canned tomatoes were shipped in. As a gardener growing my own food and a responsible citizen reusing a container to grow them in, I felt calmer about the plastics “crisis”- I was taking action to play my own part in the solution to this global problem. Back in 1967 I could never have imagined that it would one day become socially responsible to start tomatoes growing in a can that was used to ship tomatoes in instead of throwing that container in the landfill.

Maybe this is why Dustin Hoffman asked Mr. McGuire “Just how do you mean that, sir?”

Peter Naughton-Manager, Home-Grown Food Network.

Earth Day 2009

Escaping My Mother’s Life and Creating My Own:
A Love Song for Earth and Mother’s Days
April 22, 2009,
North Palm Springs, California
Brenda Barnes, President
Home Grown Food Network, Inc.

Lately we’ve been in a spurt of activity around the front and side where we are making a Home Grown Food Network demonstration house and garden. We’re finishing our fences made out of recycled things from wine bottles to advertising ”people” cut-outs painted red, to plywood signs that were drying in the desert for 10 years made into murals, to a thrownaway car hood turned on its side. This week we’ll finish stuccoing the rammed-earth courtyard wall in the front yard and start planting in recycled planters on top of it. The gazebo frame is almost a greenhouse. We’ve pulled up juniper roots (that took days for each one!), and replaced them with a mosaic recycled tile courtyard floor and potatoes growing in garbage bags. We made a planting box equivalent to a 5′ x 5′ garden out of a truck tool box I found blown off on the side of Highway 62, adapting an idea I saw on Martha Stewart for a wooden planting box with hardware cloth to drain the planting bed.

At first I thought this spurt was because we had time, since there was a lull in all the litigation I’ve been working on for years. Then I thought it was because we bought a Toyota pickup with money we got paid for winning a motion, so we could bring materials here easier. You know how they say once a Marine, always a Marine? I think once a lawyer, always a lawyer. My first thought always is my legal work causes everything, but then I realize there is a lot more to it than that.

It’s been 12 years since I was a lawyer. I guess it’s not surprising I have changed so much and can now finally on second thought see things in more than just a legal way. Twelve years is as long as I was in grades one through 12. I changed in those 12 years from a little five-year-old who couldn’t read, to a graduation speaker making a cliched point misquoting JFK’s inauguration speech a few months before. ”Ask not what your country can do for you. . .”

That much time can really change a person—and did change me. I went from a poor girl in too large a family with no prospects other than staying stuck on the wrong side of the Kern River in Oildale, to a 17-year old with full scholarships to Berkeley. I was so grateful to never have to even look back to Oildale, much less live there. I also thought I had escaped my mother’s life.

Those prior 12 years growing up were days I remember well, and still shudder. That was when women chose whether to be mothers, nurses, secretaries, or teachers. Or failing to qualify for any of those, they fell back on being waitresses, hairdressers, house cleaners, or babysitters. Or failing to qualify for any of those, they became nondescript miscellaneous ”crazies,” who lived alone in little houses, were called Grandma, and wouldn’t return balls hit over their fences.

I was so scared I would end up being any of those except a teacher—which seemed to me my only chance to escape my mother’s life or worse. So I desperately made choices I thought I had to make along the way. I refused to take typing in 12th grade because even with 11 years of straight A grades I knew if I learned to type, I’d end up being a secretary. I got married at 19 because we both planned to go back to Berkeley in the fall after we met, and my dad said he was sure I’d live with my boyfriend, so if I didn’t get married I couldn’t go. Kids were minors then until we were 21. So I took 10 milligrams a day of estrogen in Enovid, the new birth control pill that would let me finish college even though I was married. That was also when if women had ”good” husbands and could manage to do all the housework after we came home from work, we felt lucky our husbands ”let” us work.

Late in that 12 years I began to feel side effects of so much estrogen and then progesterone, which was all they had in birth control pills then whereas now there are combinations to fight those side effects. The current hormone dosage in birth control pills is less than one-tenth of a milligram a day, but I took 10 milligrams a day, 100 times that much, for two years, 5 a day for a year, and then 1 a day for a few more years. My heart started beating irregularly, and I knew something bad might happen. The OB-Gyn told me to stop taking birth control pills immediately and prescribed three alternative forms of birth control. I became pregnant in two months. I didn’t die, but I got married again.

That 12 years when I was getting educated and divorced, being a teacher, and being a human guinea pig had also changed all women in the United States, not just me. The 12 years after I graduated from high school in 1961 included growth of Feminism. Thank you, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and all the many, many others. Those 12 years also included Title 7 and 9. Therefore, my class that started in 1972 at UCLA School of Law had one-third women, the first class with more than a token few. Roe v. Wade was decided in my first year of law school. I wondered if later generations would know what it meant to never have to get married if you didn’t decide in advance for your own reasons to do so.

I was caught in the middle. I had moved to the future, but I was married with a child, in a way in my mother’s life. I tried to do it all, be it all, be a mother and wife (how terrible I was at it, I can’t face even today), and become and then be a lawyer. Seeing how much better I am at law today than I was 12 years ago, I think I must have been pretty terrible at being a lawyer, too, but I didn’t know it then and I’m not sure even now.

My mother helped raise my son so I could do it all. She was my Sojourner Truth, so selfless in helping me escape. Then she moved to Louisiana with my brother when he went to teach at a better medical school. She raised his kids, also, so he and his wife, a world-class oncology surgeon, could do it all.

I had come too far in some ways and not far enough in other ways to escape. I focused on my husband and son, the real estate investments I had made while I was a teacher, then my law career. I tried to figure out why–when I had achieved far more than that five-year-old in Oildale or even the graduation speaker could ever have imagined—I was so miserable. Between 1973 and 1985 I went through 12 years of alternating light and dark, drank too much, wrote in my journals too much, and went to a lot of therapists. I dreamed all the time of another path, any path, of escape.

Finally, in 1985 I stopped trying to escape the truth of my misery and started to climb out of a pit. I realized I had never even thought about what I wanted from my life. I had just done what I had to do to escape my mother’s life. Then I had rebelled against doing that, in my late adolescence at age 35. Neither being a good girl nor not being a good girl had made me happy or been worth much.

It took me another 12 years to get out of law and Los Angeles and start another life. In the meantime I got divorced again, spent too long picking wrong men while single for the first time as an adult, and then really decided to marry Peter. My third marriage was the only one when I had no reason to get married except he was the best man I had ever met and I wanted to marry him.

I got certified as a Master Gardener, we both continued our studies on housing and energy, and we worked on starting a non-profit to demonstrate and educate on how to build ultra low-cost houses, grow edible landscaping, and use renewable energy. Peter built a beautiful tiny house out of recycled materials using only hand tools. We were green long before it was cool. We finally got the charity started in 2003, started building a big, gracious ultra-low cost house in 2004, and actually planted more than a token amount of edible landscaping in 2006. I felt forced by legal pushes to do what little it seemed to me I actually accomplished on my own goals. However, I did accomplish some things, for whatever reasons, and they were toward my goals, not someone else’s or rebelling against someone else’s.

There have been five 12-year cycles since I was five. It seems to me the next one will be the best, but the last one has been good in a lot of ways too.

For a long time I thought we would not survive the Bush presidency. Wiretapping Americans in America without warrants, torturing prisoners, keeping protestors away at all times—I was terrified we were being taken over by a modern-day Gestapo. I couldn’t sleep for a month thinking another Republican might get elected and do more of the same, and worse.

As a result the apolitical Brenda is gone forever. I read the New York Times online every day and sign every petition that comes along. We’re preparing a competitive grant proposal for Obama’s green energy and broadband extension stimulus package. Today I signed up for a local action council.

And we’re growing potatoes in garbage bags and salad greens everywhere. I realized since we are doing it all in a lightweight way with little water, that could be revolutionary. Roofs are the most underutilized space there is for growing food for ourselves, and the main problem with roof gardens has been the weight of growing media and water.

In the meantime, my mother has become incapacitated with macular degeneration and pre-dementia. She’s 87 and in a fog, after all these years of taking care of other people. I never could pay her back for what she did for me, but I didn’t realize there wouldn’t be time to even try while she was aware. At least, though, I’ve learned the importance of wellness practices for illness prevention, so I can pay it forward. Growing our own food without chemicals and long transportation that destroys nutrients is part of that.

Life is good. Growing is good. Maybe I have not only escaped, but also learned some things about my mother’s life and my own that will improve the world. I’ll let you know in the next 12 years.

– 30 -

from Peter Naughton on Earth Day

Wanting to have an expanded global consciousness today I made a special effort to become aware of planetary issues. I watched the movie For Love of Water (FLOW) this morning. (see the trailer here) I sent an email off to Autumn, our granddaughter, with a link to a project where musicians all around the world are playing music to raise our consciousness so that we can all act cooperatively- Playing for Change. Then I went off to my day job helping community development projects get chores done. In mid-afternoon, to unwind from all that, I joined Shuperman for a freshwater fishing adventure in Morongo Valley, California. Just before we started fishing President Obama made an Earth Day Proclamation.

As soon as I heard that Proclamation, fishing on Earth Day began to rankle a bit on my nerves. I started thinking “I should do something that makes me think more about earth on earth day than hanging out on water’s edge”. The guilt was building until Shuperman started catching fish. Suddenly the old primal “gotta catch more fish than the other guy” “instinct” took over. Away went the guilt and wham!, I started changing baits from yellow to brown, brown to brown green, and brown green to PINK, yes pink, anything to catch the most fish. I had no intention of eating any fish, I just wanted to gratify my own ego about catching more than Shuperman.

I could not hook one fish even. Every time they would follow my bait right up to the shore, I could see them do so in the very clean water, they would seemingly look up, see me, give me a look which implied “not you again” and turn around… leaving my pretty pink bait twirling its plastic tail like a little pink piggy tail.

The mosquitoes finally got the better of us around dusk and I conceded defeat, Shuperman 6, plus 1 that got away (out of his hand), me -zero.

Driving home I realized that even though our fishing venue was more of a pond than a lake, I hadn’t cared, it was good enough to fish in to show who could catch the most. Suddenly I got goosebumps- “nobody”, (that’s me), really cares about where we do stuff anymore, we only care about looking better than the “other guy”. Nobody pays any attention to where we are, (fragile planet, earth), any more, we just want to look better than the other guys!

When I got home I decided to be uncomplicated about my happiness to have had such an enlightening experience of nature today- I just went and hugged our tangerine tree, spoke to our wonderful grapevines, promising to give them an extended trellis to grow over this year, and then, I kissed the earth from which our. possibly Oscar winning, potatoes have sprung. I think honoring the potato will make up to my Irish Grandfathers for using a pink bait to try to catch fish with!

Peter Naughton, Manager,

Potato Grown in Garbage Bag Makes Movie History!

I am updating my log of events surrounding the Home Grown Food Network experimental house project in Desert Hot Springs, California. I was recording the fact that, while we were out of town about three weeks ago, a professional camera crew mounted a tripod, and using ladders to climb on to peer over our fence, shot some pictures of our front yard. This reminds me of my blog “Home Grown Tomato Wins Oscar“. Note, we have only have two tomato plants in our front yard this year, and neither of them, in my opinion, is Oscar winning material. So why would anyone try to take pictures of our front yard without asking our permission- or worse, wait until they knew we were out of town before doing so?. We have a No Trespass notice posted in front of the project. We have supplied Management with the detailed plans that guide work on this project, so this current bout of filming is even more inexplicable. And over six foot high fences no less!

It may be that the Park Management read our blog about “Growing Potatoes in a Garbage Bag” and, not liking this, hired a crew to shoot footage of our potato plant blooming in a garbage bag. Using unusual containers in 2009 gardens is part of a trend in the home gardening movement. Throughout the country, you can find everything from”old boots to birdcages ” in use as containers for growing food plants. Last year Management condemned our use of a recycled birdcage to support tomato plants in our west side garden. When we pointed out that this is common practice they stated that they objected to it because the birdcage wasn’t store bought, apparently insinuating that if it were accompanied by a receipt it would be ok! Perhaps Management think they might like to re-open this issue, this time using our potato growing in a recycled garbage bag as the basis for legal action!

Try as I might to find a motive for hiring a camera crew I cannot do so, and, in spite of the above future legal action scenario, I tend to conclude that someone wants to make our Garbage Bag Potato Plant into a movie star.

Planning for People or Cameras?

Now we have another sad example of a city planning goal being misused for political gain, this time in Florida. There, in the city of Riviera Beach, as reported by the New York Times , officials are seeking to ban its citizens from wearing drooping trousers! They do so because, in the words of one of the city officials, “We’re working very hard to improve the image of our city”, and, “just as we can dictate the height to which certain trees can grow”, so we have the right to maintain dress standards!

Is this just a bit too much? Surprising as it might sound, this kind of thinking abounds among city fathers everywhere. Urban politicians are very fond of grandiose sounding goals-Planning Goals. Just thumb through any General Plan and you will find goals like- “promote a high quality of life”,”strengthen the community’s creative and cultural identity” or “provide enriching growth opportunities for the entire community”, liberally sprinkled throughout the document. “Improving”, the “image” of the city falls into this category too. The dirty little secret is that city planning lacks any means by which cities can reliably reach such Planning Goals. The only means they have are “Standards” for “Guiding” “Land Use” in order to “Manage” “Development Activity”, so called Development Control Standards.

In the past decade, city planners across the planet have seen Development Control Standards fail miserably as the means to reach Planning Goals. Yet their silence on this failure is deafening, and has led to Development Control Standards being used for political purposes, especially in rapidly growing cities. The standards become tougher under the false flag of “needing” to be “more effective” to “change” whatever behavior it is fashionable to oppose at the time while pretending to have a planning goal at heart. “Toughening” them often means intruding on individual rights.

For example, in the United States weed free ordinances were enforced to reach the common planning goal of “Making Great Places by Insisting on the Highest Standards of Quality in Architecture, Landscaping and Urban Design”. Weed free ordinances were based on the concept that “a smooth closely shaven surface of grass is by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds of a suburban house” and that “a premium needs to be placed on neatness and conformity”, because neatness and conformity are accepted symbols of a thriving city! Such ordinances are still, used to stifle individual rights of self expression in landscaping.

Imposing weed free ordinances, or any kind of ordinance, to promote a “good community spirit” is, at best, counterproductive, and at worst, blatant discrimination against behavior on an ethnic or class basis. Professor Kevin Lynch, in his masterpiece work,The Image of the City, stated that city dwellers create the image of the city in their own minds, each individual being entitled to their own image. I hazard a guess that he would turn in his grave to know that 21 st century urban government officials, using dress codes as their tool, are now regulating people, of a specific socio-economic status and/or ethnic background in the name of the “image of the city” with a goal of imposing one image on all, without even saying what that image is or who it is being aimed at!

Perhaps at a giant roving camera in the heavens seeking out the perfect city image!

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network