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
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