Working on the Fence, Gates, and Walls for A Less Than $20,000 Apartment

Brenda Barnes, Home Grown Food Network President
November 1, 2009
What a lot has happened since I last wrote in August! We settled the last existing legal case we were involved in! Actually other people settled it and we just went along with it, very happily. I am so tired of disputes. I never was made to be a lawyer, since I want to, as Rodney King said, “just get along.”
So settling the last case forces us to think, what do we want to do for the rest of our life? I did a lot of dreaming—travel, move to Ireland or France or the Czech Republic, win the lottery. Then I thought why would I be more likely to do those things now? What I really would be more likely to do now that I don’t have to spend time, energy, and emotion on legal cases is more HGFN work. That’s what I was doing when I was so (rudely or not) interrupted. I quit practicing law in 1997 to do that. So I started thinking what can we do now that we couldn’t do when I had to dread hundreds of hours of legal work?
First we got three hens and Peter built them a moveable coop in the back yard.
Then we started rearranging the house where we’re staying temporarily, so we can do a demonstration garden there and have some special events.
Then we did drawings for putting up a welded wire fence around the area and starting a compost bin and mulching where we agreed to help tenants of a client’s apartment building create and run a community garden for themselves. That has been great fun and expanded our view of what we can do.
The tenants are poorer than the focus group for Home-Grown Food Network. These tenants are people who live on Social Security Disability payments or pick-up work because there is something wrong with their past, like being ex-convicts, that keeps them from getting a job. The people we’ve aimed at for Home Grown Food Network were working poor people with two minimum-wage jobs each by two parents, so we could foresee that with only one job each they could support themselves while they built a $20,000 house with the time they used to be spending on the other jobs. These tenants are less than half that well-off.
I never thought Home Grown Food Network could help them. We don’t aim to help homeless people in general, or disabled people. We really were focused from the beginning on food security, quality, and cost. The only reason we expanded the goals of the charity to ultra-low cost housing and renewable energy is we realized once we started working on edible landscaping that since most of the plants were perennial, people needed to have stable, affordable housing, or they wouldn’t make it to harvest.
But since our client and friend is dedicated to helping these tenants, we can bypass the problem of providing long-term housing for them. Also, to cover his costs on the garden we are working with him on solar-heating the pool and apartments. So it is a very interesting way of getting back to our first goal: promoting, educating about, and demonstrating edible landscaping.
We had hardly begun when one night I kept having this recurring dream, me planting a tiny marijuana plant underneath an herb plant. I’d keep waking up and saying to myself that is ridiculous, I never saw such a small marijuana plant, or some such thing, and going back to sleep, but then I’d have the same dream again.
When I woke up in the morning I’d had that same dream at least four times. Suddenly it occurred to me that if we were going to have a community garden, we would have to confront the issue of what to do if someone planted marijuana there. Of course!
I googled “community garden” and marijuana and there were over 52,000 entries! And God had to send me the same dream four times before I even thought of it. It turns out to be a problem with every one of those 52,000 people, who are community garden managers, organizers, City officials, organization members, neighbors, and such. The ones planting the marijuana don’t seem to write, at least not in the first four pages of entries I read.
The client was adamant that allowing the tenants to make money growing marijuana—even in California, where such production for medical use is legal—was not what he wanted to do, so that was that. It will be against the rules of this community garden to plant any plant that could expose the garden to controversy. Sounds like a tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous, appropriately enough.
We are hooking up a wireless Internet connection for the tenants to share in a cubicle in the hall, with passwords we give them. We’ll see how that works.
Last time I wrote a blog I said I had read in the New York Times that estimates are there are now a million absolutely homeless people in the United States (with more being foreclosed on every day, I now hear), and besides truly homeless people there are over 30 million renters who will never even have their name on a mortgage for a house, the way things are now. There may be another 200 million who will never pay a mortgage off, to truly own a house. I think all those estimates are far too low, but whatever the number, virtually all those people could build their own houses and be free. We are very happy to be helping a truly wonderful landlord help people living in seven apartments.
It’s an exciting life. More on our and at least 231 million other people’s progress later.

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