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.

- 30 -

A chicken tractor is, according to the Double Tongue Dictionary, “A bottomless, mobile chicken coop that rests directly on the ground.”(more). Even though our chicken coop is bottomless, it never felt like a tractor because it has been in the same place in the yard for almost two months. I had thought of moving it. Brenda said I should move it. Jim said I should move it. In fact although it was clear that The Board wanted it to be moved, I, the manager, was still dragging my heels. “Are we ready”, I asked myself, ” to own a tractor?” What about the huge movements of capital, visits to the bank, paperwork, instructions about cold weather starting and the like”. Nothing of the sort was needed. I am here to tell you that it took me and the chickens about 30 minutes to move, or should I say, to get our very first tractor parked.

Peter Naughton-Manager, Home-Grown Food Network

I watch our chickens-three cross bred Americana Browns-for at least ten minutes a day. I think they are fascinating to observe, and so do thousands of people around the internet! In fact some chicken fans let you follow their chickens by putting a webcam in the coop with them! ( watch )

Such entertainment, and at hardly any expense!. (I built the coop the chickens live in with pvc piping and mesh wire that altogether cost $25). We feed them all the left over greens we have from our kitchen plus feed pellets from the feed store-it takes them two weeks to eat $4 of that.

Yesterday we opened up the coop door and the three of them spent the entire day out rambling happily around our yard. At dusk they returned to the coop without any direction from us and there settled down for a quiet night.

Our chickens are not laying eggs yet, but who cares- their engaging, friendly and entertaining behavior is ample reward for having them around. Jim Shupe, who donated the chickens to Home Grown Food Network, and an expert breeder, predicts that our particular cross breed of Americana Browns will be laying eggs next month. I can hardly wait!

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network

While sightseeing in Manhattan last week we accidentally discovered a cure for going crazy while stuck in traffic there- counting greenhouses, window boxes, or other evidences of apartment gardening in high rise buildings. Try it sometime! I guarantee you you will be surprised to see how many people living in apartments are cultivating a green thumb.
Our window box/balcony garden counting adventure began after a leisurely morning working up an appetite cruising Henry Hudson Parkway. We stopped for lunch on 73rd street. Brenda went off to the Red Fort Tandoori on 74th and I went to the famous Finnegan’s Wake Restaurant and to a creative bakery across the street for a very traditional Irish desert of a chocolate scone. Thus well fed, we headed uptown thinking we were going to conquer the East Side, but suddenly we found ourselves snarled in endless traffic. It was while stuck at 1st and 96th that we started noticing how many urban gardeners live in that area, and after that whenever we found ourselves stationary we passed the time counting window boxes on balconies in whatever area we were in.
It is very humbling always to visit any great city and to witness the miracle of human harmony that it represents. However I think that land use planners have made it unnecessarily difficult for city inhabitants to enjoy gardening as a social networking activity, and thereby miss out on an opportunity to diminish social unrest and urban ennui.

Home Grown Food Network is striving to ensure that access to an urban garden for everyone is provided for in future. Seeing how interested even high rise apartment dwellers in New York, one of the most densely populated cities on earth, have in growing flowers and food, there might be a lot of support for it.

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network

Rumor has it that more chickens are clucking in urban yards around America because raising chickens for fresh eggs seems to be a natural progression in the move toward sustainability. We took delivery of our first chickens yesterday, and I am already a big fan of theirs!

They seem easy to look after too. I got some feed for them from the feed store and Brenda went to the grocery store and persuaded the produce department manager to give her produce trimmings, lettuce leaves and stalks, for them. Even though we have only had these birds resident on the property for a day and a half I already feel delighted that we got them.

We got three chickens because three will not violate any zoning regulations if you have them in a coop like we have. You will not be surprised to know that The Zoning Czars have a sharp eye on this issue and have generated a maze of comments, rules and edicts about the role of the chicken in urban life. (more).

I had looked forward to having fresh eggs when we were building the coop, but who could have imagined how soothing chicken noises would be in the background of our busy lives? In my opinion these noises are constantly soothing reminders of nature’s harmony. I even think that counting chicken clucks could be better than counting sheep for inducing sleep, but I will have to do some more research (take more naps) on that before I know for sure. It’s dirty work, but somebody has got to do it!

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network

Since June 15th, we’ve been working on moving to a new house in Arizona and getting the land in Joshua Tree ready for a new Home Grown Food Network under $20,000 demonstration house. Sometimes I think I’m amazed at how much we have gotten done. Other times I’m embarrassed how little we’ve done. All the time I’m quite overwhelmed how much there is left to do.

My son’s father Floyd helped us by finding a motor home in Arizona for $1,200, and then helping Peter get it to the Joshua Tree land (after updating the title and registration in Arizona). It’s an old motor home, so we’re not planning on driving it, really. I learned while looking for something with a toilet and shower (plus a stove and refrigerator, but that wasn’t as important to us since we like outdoor kitchens), that old motor homes are the cheapest way to go. They get terrible gas mileage, and besides they’re so old that they can’t be relied on to travel in, so there isn’t much of a market for them. That fit our needs just fine. We just needed someplace to be in out of the weather and have privacy so we can stay there overnight if we want to every once in awhile, while we are building our compound that substitutes for a house and a yard.

Floyd learned he had acute leukemia last week, just a few days after he was driving on Highway 62 with Peter. Pray for him. He’s in UCLA Hospital now, the best teaching hospital there is around here, so I’m sure he’s getting the latest treatment. They say people live with that now for 10 years, compared to four months if they don’t get treated, so it’s lucky he kept pushing himself and finally got so dizzy my son and his wife took him to the emergency room in Joshua Tree, where the tests they did showed his Santa Monica doctor he had leukemia or some other serious illness, so she had him admitted right then. I saw him Saturday, when he’d had transfusions for days so he had his energy back and looked good.

Peter is going on with putting up the welded wire fence around the area where the compound will be. We’ll post drawings soon.

It’s going to be a California indoor-outdoor living space, 4,200 square feet “under roof,” as the real estate ads say. For less than $20,000 including the land and off-the-grid utilities and water tanks, and plants, with some animals like chickens and talapia, growing all our own food. Of course I bought the land at a tax sale years ago when Joshua Tree was the cheapest really nice place around, so one could not duplicate that now. Nonetheless, the concept is valid: if people want to build their own houses and not have any mortgage, utility bills, or food costs, they can, for less than $20,000 total cost, and for the amount as they go along that people on Social Security or welfare, or workers on minimum wages, can afford. The per square foot cost of the under-roof living space is less than $5! I’ve been reading and watching shows lately on House Hunters International about houses in third-world countries for 100 times that much. To say nothing of Santa Monica.

Last Saturday I drove to Santa Monica and back, to see Floyd and to take things and do some errands for my son, who had gone quickly from Joshua Tree the day before when he heard his father had been admitted to the hospital. I was tired at the end of it, but it cost less than $30 in gas, round-trip, and took less than half a day. So I don’t see any sense in living there in a condo for $375,000 plus more in monthly homeowners’ fees than it will cost us for living here, with yards where we can have pets and livestock if we want to, and where we can experience what people drive from Santa Monica to see, the National Park and amazing sunsets, plus have five full-service casinos and 200 golf courses within an hour’s drive. I spent 35 years “living” at the beach, but really working all the time to pay the expenses of being there. Now I’m happy to see it once in awhile and have a real life here. All I miss is an El Pollo Loco and some restaurants that stay open after 9 p.m. right in town. The closest place for that is Palm Springs or Cathedral City, 30 miles away.

The fence Peter is putting up is going to have a row of tall nut and fruit trees inside it, then a wall 10 feet high and three feet thick, made of tires stuffed with earth. These walls last 1,000 years or longer, through earthquakes and floods, and are fireproof. Those plus wind and sun damage—to which these walls are also impervious—are all the natural hazards we have to worry about here. Therefore, there is no reason to follow any uniform building codes covering snowloads or hurricanes or tornadoes.

I have written before about how difficult it was to learn we could actually build a house this way without permits and grow all our own food here, legally. That makes me think it may be possible to do the same kind of thing—adapted for different conditions–a lot more places than people think. 99 people out of 100 would have given up at the third planning office I went to, after I already had done enough research to see the idea, where the third set of planners told me we would need a conditional use permit (read: forget it) to do what I said we wanted to do. I am sure if I had not been a real estate lawyer myself I would never have either had the original ideas myself or found a lawyer who would have suggested it is possible, even, so I wouldn’t have tried the first planning office. I spent literally 200 hours in three months back at the first planning office after I went to the third one, hanging around, asking my same questions one more new way, until finally a planner told me the last key to the puzzle, just to get rid of me so he could go back to his online Solitaire game in peace.

Regardless, though, of how hard it was to figure out and get through the maze of government regulation, the fact is that Peter and I are the perfect people to have figured this out, and we are going to do what we figured out how to do, and tell everyone along the way. Housing does not have to be the ridiculous mess planners and the rest of incompetent, elitist governments have made it. I read today in the New York Times that estimates are there are now a million absolutely homeless people in the United States. Some of them are living in flood drainage pipes under the Las Vegas Strip, where they could be drowned by flash floods, rather than be hassled by police and killed by sport-killers above ground. 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, so they truly own a house. I think all those estimates are far too low, but whatever the number, there are many, many people out there being preyed upon by landlords, real estate speculators and developers, and governments, besides police and sport-killers, when the fact is all those people could build their own houses and be free.

It’s an exciting life. More on our and at least 231 million other people’s progress later.

In a recent blog, one of my favorite bloggers, GrrlScientist, has a picture of a homeless lady in New York city eating cat food . The blog highlights the reaction of New York City to the findings of New York State auditors who have discovered “new data” about the costs of homelessness in that state.

As I often say, land use planners act as surprised on discovering homeless humans as if they had found aliens disembarking from a mother ship in their plan areas. Now the accountants are acting surprised too, and, as GrrlScientist points out, they are full of ideas on how to punish the homeless, or if not punish them, at least give them some menu advice, (updated from pre-French Revolution times), accompanied by a regally dismissive nod, ” let them eat cat food”.

From where will a new attitude to the plight of the homeless emerge? I look for clues! The National Alliance to End Homelessness has a fact sheet, for kindergarten and second graders, that aims to lead the students to generate their own individual perception of homeless people. Unfortunately by the time these second graders have grown up, and should they be fortunate enough to get to an Ivy League School for example, they will be virtually forced into “agitating for a serious national debate on the question of the degree to which we still want to consider home ownership a public good!”. The basis of this debate is, yes you guessed it, a theory, which, similar to the theory on which the principles of “Proper Planning” rest, demands that anything that cannot be “explained” by “the theory” simply doesn’t exist! If “the non-existent phenomenon” needs to eat cat food to live on, that’s a curiosity, but not necessarily one to be taken seriously.

At Home Grown Food Network we are part of a network of awareness of how a bright future is possible for homeless people. It is based on the concept that a house for under $20,000 can be provided in a way that low income people can understand and use to create a dignified and creative environment for themselves and their families. Institutional barriers to this concept, such as discriminatory zoning practices, are being challenged and overcome on a daily basis. The result is a new understanding of how solutions to homelessness need not cost as much as they do.
It also provides opportunities for people to grow their own food in their own gardens and not need to eat cat food from a tin while perched on a doorstep that is not their own.

Peter Naughton, Manager, Home-Grown Food Network

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

North Palm Springs-Joshua Tree, California
This week we made a lot of progress in our under-$20,000, easy, fast, cheap, self-made housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy project.

We had updated my research from a few years ago last week and discovered in the county anything allowed in the zone can still be put in without a permit. Home Grown Food Network owns 2.5 acres there in a lovely location to demonstrate under $20,000 gracious, large, wonderful housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy. All of that, and a 10,000 square foot agricultural building and produce selling, are allowed in the zone, which is rural living.

It took me several trips to three different planning offices in the county a few years ago to finally get someone to tell me how to establish crop cultivation use on land. And I had 20 years as a real estate lawyer, so I thought I knew the right questions to ask. One planner told me we needed a conditional use permit! So Desert Hot Springs is not alone in making things difficult for people. Governments are governments.

It turns out you need 10 trees and some kind of watering system for them. We could do that with our self-watering planters made from recycled 55-gallon plastic food drums within a day, without even having any water onsite. Each planter takes 20 gallons of water to water itself for five months, so a few trips in a pickup with water and we’d have it. If we wanted onsite watering, we could just buy a water tank, put it on a wooden tower to gravity-feed, and have some water delivered.

So now I told you how to do it, without any trips to any planning offices. And not even any permits required, much less a conditional use permit, which would take thousands of dollars and years for an ordinary person to get approved, so it was just ridiculous to say that was necessary. Governments are—you fill in the blank. I’m the President of a 501(c)(3) charity, so I have to be careful not to be too political.

Anyway, the Home Grown Food Network land is less than a block from the main highway through the area, and a courthouse with a large parking lot not used on Saturdays and Sundays when we will be having most of our events. The front of the lot on the Palm Springs side is where the street that goes to the courthouse from the highway, Whitefeather Road, would go if it extended the other way from the highway. We are going to put in broken concrete pieces and spray-paint them yellow for a “yellow brick road” to the site, about 800 feet to the edge of our lot, which is another about 300 feet in front. If the county ever extends the road in that direction, we’ll already have a sidewalk.

Peter and I went there late one day this week, when it was almost dusk, to walk that route from the courthouse and lots of other parking along the highway. It’s just sand and creosote bushes now, and two tiny washes a foot or so wide and deep, but it will be easy to cover with the broken concrete. Goodness knows there’s plenty of that to recycle in the world. I think the interesting thing about reusing it broken is that it is permeable then, so rain percolates down into the aquifer instead of running off into gutters and flooding roads, then becoming a dirty mess at the wastewater treatment center.

Walking there we were so blown away as we always are by how beautiful the view is all around. You can see the rocks of Joshua Tree National Park to the East, San Gregonio mountain in Palm Springs in the far distance about 25 miles away to the North, the Chocolate Mountains, I think they’re called, to the South before 29 Palms, and a huge mesa with more mountains in the distance to the West. In this part of the county everyone calls the distances something else—Palm Springs is called West, 29 Palms East, the mesa North, and the Park South, but my compass has them closer to what I said. Whatever, the views in all directions are so magnificent. People say there is a 360 degree view, but even more so, the sky—always blue during our 360 days per year of sunshine–goes up and away in all directions for miles, and once you start to love it as we do, the desert earth is colorful and beautiful. So it is a three-dimensional 360 degree view, is that 720 degrees?

When you’re there at night it is in a way even more awesome. The sky is black and it seems like the stars are just hundreds of feet away. We see falling and shooting stars every hour or so. There are billions of stars and planets, of course, and here it seems as if we can see all of them. Our grandchildren learned the galaxies and planets at young ages because they are so easy to see with your naked eyes.

So what a place to build demonstration houses and landscaping! I would have preferred to start in Desert Hot Springs because it is more accessible for the millions of people surrounding us within 300 miles (Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix-Tucson, and San Diego-Yuma-Baja California, Mexico). It also is five acres of commercial land so we will make millions for the charity developing it some day. However, today it is much easier to start in San Bernardino County, where there are no permits required, and it is just as beautiful.

I made a drawing of how we’re going to begin, and Peter will use CAD to put it on the website. In the meantime since we started work on this our Board member Jim Shupe has built a misting system for rooting cuttings that has a sensor for controlling water use, unlike ones available commercially for the same cost of about $200, which just use timers. We will need thousands of plants. We’ll buy the first bunch to establish the crop cultivation use of the land and provide some privacy at the first demonstration site until we have something we want people to see. Then we’ll be able to root our own cuttings for virtually nothing, just the water cost and our labor, taking cuttings from plants in the area where people are already growing good-tasting, productive food.

Peter is going to move the welded-wire fence he put up in Desert Hot Springs, and we decided to make this first space bigger and put in a very large demonstration house and areas for WWOOFERS and other volunteers who want to camp out and learn and help on the farm. So we’re going to add more welded wire fencing. The land in Desert Hot Springs is called a “boulder patch,” whereas the land here is sandy with no rocks to speak of in it, so it will be much easier to build the fence here. I feel bad about having to have him move the fence within a month of building it, but he says he’s OK with that.

We bought a small old motor home for $500 and the $100 cost of getting the registration and smog permit up to date, so we’ll stay out on the land in that some if we want to while we’re building. We also are going to buy at least one 19′ diameter “yome” from Red Sky [link]. It’s in North Carolina, and my dad and mom are not well in the New Orleans area, so since shipping costs $220 and we can make the trip for that one way, we’ll combine going there to pick it up with a trip in our Toyota pickup to see Mom and Dad. We loved traveling around the South for two weeks instead of flying when my niece Allison got married a few years ago. That trip—and especially the Smokey Mountains where we’ll go back again to pick up the yome—has been punctuation of our lives (as the late Dr. David Viscott says vacations are) for both of us, so we really look forward to going back. Savannah, Charleston, the Outer Banks. Lovely places, especially after our favorite of all, New Orleans. This time we thought we’d start with the west coast of Florida after New Orleans and not go so far north but go to the Bahamas, different places Peter has never been and I love. It sounds so good the whole family wants to come, so if it can be fit in with year-round basketball practice for our budding pro 14-year old six-foot granddaughter, who’s on the Santa Monica High basketball team as of three weeks ago, they will fly and meet us there. My parents are in their late 80s, so we should not put it off.

In the meantime, this week we’ll get more done on the land. It’s work, but the inspiration of the mission fuels us. What an exciting life!

– 30 –

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 –

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