http://www.freedigger.com/ A weblog on community gardening and guerilla gardening in New York City. en soiledhands@gmail.com 2008-11-17T02:36:00-05:00 http://www.freedigger.com/index.php/weblog/changed_addresses/ After two years of being frustrated with the complexities of Expression Engine, I’ve gone over to WordPress, which is sooooo much easier to work with. My new blog is called Soiled Hands, and you can find it here: http://soiledhands.wordpress.com/. Mark Leger 2008-11-17T02:36:00-05:00 http://www.freedigger.com/index.php/weblog/a_man_named_pearl/ Mark Leger 2008-07-25T00:57:00-05:00 http://www.freedigger.com/index.php/weblog/on_the_road/ I’m on a road trip from Los Angeles up to my brother’s house in Sacramento. I’m writing this at a flea bag hotel near the start of Highway 99.  When I checked in, the woman at the front desk (60ish with lots of tattoos) asked if I was from out-of-town or not. I told her I’m from Brooklyn. She said, “Good. I’ll give you one of the better rooms. The locals tear things up too much.” Across the street is the legendary Buck Owens Crystal Palace. My route here was 101 to a canyon road that took me to Malibu, where I followed Highway 1 up the coast to just past Ventura where I caught Highway 33 up through Los Padres National Forest. That was an amazing road. Hairpin turns, rugged mountains, and banks of Matilja poppies in full bloom. However, it was distressing to see all of the dying oaks. Mark Leger 2008-06-09T06:55:00-05:00 http://www.freedigger.com/index.php/weblog/my_walk_with_chris/ My friend Chris Carlsson is in town promoting his terrific new book, Nowtopia. The premise of the book is that there’s a new politics of work that has separated itself from the market. People are doing things because they need doing, and because they get creative and social satisfaction from doing it. Chris looks at “vacant lot gardeners” along with pirate programmers, outlaw bicyclists, bio-fuel developers and the like. It’s very fascinating and compelling. What I like about his premise is that it links what community gardeners are doing with renegades from the market to give a vision of an very vital, very anarchic movement. So Chris came out to East Bushwick and I gave him a tour of the community gardens in the neighborhood. We also stopped by the Biko Center, which is the Afro-centric community and cultural center about a block from my house.  Mark Leger 2008-05-08T20:47:00-05:00 http://www.freedigger.com/index.php/weblog/photo_gallery/ I need to learn how to use the batch entry feature of the photo gallery for this damn program—or probably better yet, transfer to an easier to use blogging program. Anyway, I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos taken over the past couple weeks to Picasa: click here Mark Leger 2008-05-07T01:35:01-05:00 http://www.freedigger.com/index.php/weblog/who_says_community_gardening_has_lost_its_edge/ Mark Leger 2008-04-28T02:53:00-05:00 http://www.freedigger.com/index.php/weblog/herbs_garden/ Click here to see portfolio of Herb’s Garden Mark Leger 2008-03-14T02:42:00-05:00 http://www.freedigger.com/index.php/weblog/what_a_week/ Click for larger view Mark Leger 2008-03-02T23:50:01-05:00 http://www.freedigger.com/index.php/weblog/in_search_of_soil/ Last spring I tried to facilitate a soil delivery for the Granite Street Garden. I had a graciously officious email exchange with Susan Fields, who at the time was GreenThumb‘s deputy director. She is now the program manager for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s GreenBridge program. Turns out the last workshops that GreenThumb offered in Brooklyn to qualify for soil delivery were in October. Damn. A February 13 workshop in the Bronx was our last chance to qualify, unless we wanted to go to a worm composting workshop at lefty bookstore Bluestockings next week. Because the Manhattan workshop was clearly designed for the convenience of Lower East Side gardeners, who are disproportionately white, and not the gardeners in Harlem, who are proportionately people of color, I just couldn’t bring myself to support it. Well, as a veteran of fighting City Hall, I can’t say that you can’t do it and win. But I can say that City Hall will always extract its pound of flesh. So even though I’ve been composting for 30 years, and even though I set up a composting facility at the Garden of Union that GreenThumb and others uses as a showpiece, I hauled my ass up to the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx last night for a “Crazy for Composting” workshop in order to quality my garden for a delivery of soil. As you can tell, everything about this set-up was a recipe to piss me off royally. But since I try to practice Buddhism, I know that feeding the flames of anger will just make me more miserable than anything else. So I worked on calming my anger all the way up on the D train to Bedford Park Blvd. stop, then walking 8 blocks to the gate of the botanic garden, then a series of dark parking lots, until I finally found the classroom. Juniper tried to coax one of the other gardeners from Granite Street to attend the workshop, too. So he tried to Hopstop the directions to make it easier. Here’s his comments: I think these folks really need a kick. These directions are like a treasure hunt.  Travel from Brooklyn to the Bronx, only one available gate.  I have gone on the NY Botanic garden website, I can’t figure out the gate.  There is no street address so it does not google or hopstop.  Make the wrong turn and you are disqualified. When I got there, I saw there were a couple old friends. So I wouldn’t say it was worth it, but it was nice to see Karen and Eileen. The workshop teacher, Jodie Colón, did an enthusiastic, sometimes even funny, job. But the lesson plan was like: what is compost? how does it happen? how do you use it? I repeat, I’ve been composting for 30 years. This was basically a reprise of the enforced boredom of working class public school. Mark Leger 2008-02-14T17:04:00-05:00 http://www.freedigger.com/index.php/weblog/technorati_claim/ I’m signing on to Technorati, which requires that I post something with this code: Technorati Profile. I wanna “increase my profile,” see? Mark Leger 2008-02-04T02:49:00-05:00