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Friday, February 19, 2010

our community garden



My name is Pepper.









I live in a community garden with my brothers and sisters tomatoes, carrots, potatoes and a lot of medicinal herbs.

We used to be a happy community. We fed our neighbours who came around to visit us.

The garden door was always wide open to what was one of the most local, environment-loving, soil-fresh succulent soul-food experiences.

We fed people, but not only their stomachs.

The purest of joys filled people's hearts when they ate the food they picked in their local community gardens.

The plant-people community breathed in the same smell of earth, basked in the same golden sunshine and enjoyed splashing in the same puddles during the rainy day outings.

The plants in the local community gardens lived in peace and freedom, and so the peace and freedom
was part and parcel of the local food people ate. Just by eating the plants which were peaceful and free, the locals could taste peace. They could taste freedom.

Some friendly worms and a bit of the local compost made the soil rich. Eating the food from the local gardens was nutrient rich. When the garden was in full glow, it was not about how much food one could eat, but how much nutrients one could get from the very few plants one ate.
One plot of local community plants could last through a couple of seasons. The veggies were so nutrient-rich that people did not need to eat many of them to get full.

In peace energy and nutrient richness, healthy, the kids grew.


But, one day, something terrible happened.

The garden plants got imprisoned. Their people friends got shut out. Up in the trees, the birds and squirrels got visibly upset. The bees stopped buzzing. The black cats perched on the fence in total suspense, and could not chase the garden mice in the nights of the full moon any more. The worms got sick with worry and stopped fertilizing the soil.

A sense of revolt at the privatization of the local public gardens was thick in the air.

The plants were not allowed to feed the people locally any more. They were either trucked out of their community, or worse, they were not picked at all, so that their vibrant peace energies dried out.

The proprietary mindset gripped the public gardening spirit. It was forgotten that the first philosophical principle of public gardening is communal welcome, sharing and open access.

Instead, nameplates appeared in the public gardens, linking each plot to an individual's posession. On the one hand, the nameplates made the plots in the public gardens look like business offices. On the other hand, it all became reminiscen of a graveyard.

Memberships had to be paid to gain access. And those who imposed the membership fees and paid for them, could also pay for the meals in the restaurants. Pointlessly, the plants rustled in the wind, never to be desired by their owners.

The culture of freedom and peace of the local public gardens was yoked. The community plants withered in plain sight of people who were starving.

So, the plants in the public gardens became private property and their owners became ever vigilant persecutors of those who, sometimes, out of sheer need, crossed the barricades to pick their local food.


From glowing spaces of plant-people communion, the public gardens became a cause of unrest, fear, withering and starvation. Child poverty grew, and became worst in the country. Such was the shade of green used to paint the faux eco-masks in the community.