Food Systems and Politics Class Revitalizes the Garden

The East Village and Lower East Side have a rich history of community gardens. The gardens which still exist today had their start with the Green Guerillas a group started by neighborhood artists including Liz Christy, whose first appropriated garden still exists on the corner of Houston and Bowery, and by Puerto Rican immigrants, who brought a touch of their country/farming roots to the East Village--including chickens in some gardens. The Food Systems and Politics class is ready to contribute to that history at our garden on Mangin and East Houston.

Straw will protect the garlic and the strawberries from winter temperatures.

Class members have been learning about the history of our neighborhood gardens through readings and a recent walking tour. I visited the class one week after that walking tour (read about the tour here). The students are completely engaged, energized, and inspired to collaborate on their own Utopian vision for the Bard Garden.

A class member suggests hot pepper to keep wildlife from digging up plants and bulbs in the garden.

After going outside to see how the winter crops were faring in the cold weather, we read ¡Viva Loisaida Libre! by Bill Weinberg on his Utopian vision for the "Lower East Side Autonomous Zone" from the book Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle In the City and The World edited by Weinberg and Peter Lamborn Wilson. The essay produced a few chuckles from statements like, "...the Lower East Side Autonomous Zone will impose such heavy taxes on Avenue A's yuppie eateries that NOBODY in our territory will know want!" However, many of the author's visions which likely seemed wacky to mainstream thinkers when it was written around 15 years ago--such as total recycling, local food production, and the replacement of automobiles with bicycles and human powered taxis--have become accepted and expected. Unfortunately the author's fears and reason for the manifesto have also become more accepted. The use of space in the Lower East Side has become more governed by developers' greed. Many (but not all!) of the scrappy working and creative class who used to populate the nabe have been outpriced and have moved away. I could feel dragged down with sadness by this but the thoughfulness and creativity of the students in this class make me feel hopeful for the future.


To further encourage students to imagine ways to recycle and revitalize a community, Tess shared an interesting website with the class called urbaninform.net. Unfortunately I can't find the exact video that she showed, but it was about an urban community which reclaimed an abandoned industrial space and used discarded wooden pallets found there to create gardens and mobile libraries.

As one young woman in the class observed, a garden is for a community to enjoy and use--and a garden needs a community to maintain it. In other words, if there is no community around a garden, there is no reason for it to exist to begin with and without the care and labor of the community it will die off. With this in mind Tess encouraged students to to come up with ideas and actions that might increase awareness of the garden and to engage and strengthen the BHSEC community.

The homework assignment was to come up with a 7 point Garden Manifesto. On Thursday the class will compare notes and create a class vision. To find out what they come up with be sure to check out their blog BHSEC Food: Experiences, Resources and Musings from the BHSEC Food Systems and Politics Class. Students are required to post on the blog as part of the work for the course. The Manifesto should be up in a week or two. In the meantime check out the photos from the community garden walking tour, information on saving seeds, and planting winter crops. I will also put a link to it on the sidebar of this blog.

Thanks to Tess and Kristi for inviting me and to the students for making me feel pretty darn good.
http://bhsecfood.blogspot.com/