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Changed Addresses

2008-11-17T02:36:00-05:00

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/.

A Man Named Pearl

2008-07-25T00:57:00-05:00

I saw a very inspirational movie last night. I know, I distrust the word ‘inspirational’, too. But trust me. The title: A Man Named Pearl. It’s about an African-American sharecropper’s son living in the poorest county of South Carolina who became this stunning environmental artist. His medium: topiary gardens. His name: Pearl Fryar. The movie: A Man Named Pearl. The guy Pearl was clearly obsessed, but he was supported in his obsession by his own energy and vision and the love of his family and community. Highly recommended to any gardener who has ever met with blank stares when they talk about the pull of gardening.

On the Road

2008-06-09T06:55:00-05:00

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.

My Walk with Chris

2008-05-08T20:47:00-05:00

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.

Photo Gallery

2008-05-07T01:35:01-05:00

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

Who says community gardening has lost its edge?

2008-04-28T02:53:00-05:00

This has been a crazy period. I’ve been busy gardening on the weekends and work has been insane with an upcoming fundraising “event.” God how I hate that word. Call it a party and be done with it.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago I spent a Saturday cycling around gardens in my neighborhood of Bushwick and Ocean Hill. At the Secret Garden, this totally wild, one-acre site hidden in the middle of two blocks of row houses on Linden Street near Broadway, the folks were doing a major clean-up. They had filled up a huge dumpster with discarded furniture, auto parts, building rubble—and there was a lot more to go. This fellow found a discarded gun. Not a toy gun. A real gun. And they said this was the second gun they had found.

The “event” happens on Wednesday. After that I can relax into summer. I’ve been making many new gardening friends, so expect many more blog posting and pix.

Herb’s Garden

2008-03-14T02:42:00-05:00

More and more, the gardens that I find interesting are the pocket gardens of the city. I guess you could call them guerilla gardens. These are really the gardens of hermits. They’re not community gardens. They’re gardens created by individuals who just love to garden, and steal a little corner to do it in. One of the most amazing ones I’ve encountered is Herb’s garden. And I’m lucky, because it’s at the end of my block, just off the dead end. Herb is actually a very sociable guy. I see him all over the neighborhood hanging out with folks in their front yard, community garden, or at the car repair garages around the corner. Herb actually used to live in this dead end. He built a gazebo smack dab in the middle of it and gardened all around. The city eventually cracked down. Luckily, somebody in the neighborhood arranged for him to be a caretaker for a new housing facility.

These photos were taken last autumn. Anyday now I expect Herb will be breaking down for the spring. I’ll try to take some pictures of the garden early in the year.

What a Week

2008-03-02T23:50:01-05:00

These crocus are what gardening is all about. February is always the hardest month for me in New York. In California, where I’m from, February is when the daffodils, flowering plum, and acacia bloom. In New York, some of the coldest, snowiest days hit at the end of February. Spring doesn’t really get into full swing until April, although March is definitely a month for thawing. The end of February was especially hard for me this year. Last Saturday I fell 7 feet from the top of a ladder, breaking ribs and gashing my elbow. I’m fine--but coughing and sneezing still cause excruciating stabs of pain.

Then on Thursday I was mugged by a flock of teenagers. The mugging happened on a bitterly cold night at about 9 o’clock outside Bushwick-Aberdeen, my neighborhood’s main subway station. I live in between two subway stations; the other, Wilson Avenue, is a slightly farther walk. On Friday after work I stopped to buy some books. I found myself lingering and lingering in the bookstore. Then I realized I was avoiding going home. So I’ve been compromising and using Wilson Avenue, and paying much more attention to what’s going on around me.

So how nice it was to find these yellow crocus blooming outside my front door. They really, really, really lifted my spirits.

In Search of Soil

2008-02-14T17:04:00-05:00

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.

Technorati Claim

2008-02-04T02:49:00-05:00

I’m signing on to Technorati, which requires that I post something with this code: Technorati Profile. I wanna “increase my profile,” see?