"You gotta lock that down!"
Some of you may know that I have a bad tv-watching habit. Well, I found something really funny that is relevant to our community garden. In one of the more amusing episodes of the TV show "Arrested Development," Jason Bateman (yum!)'s character Michael tells a guy who has a hot wife, "You gotta lock that down!" The woman comes on to Michael eventually, and when her husband finds out, Michael says, "I told you you had to lock that down!" Well, I thought it was funny. Especially since Michael doesn't usually objectify women.Well, guess what? We are getting a lock for the front gate at the community garden. And guess what else? It's fine by me!
I've been feeling nervous when I go over there at night or when I am there past sundown...a (white, btw) "woman" all alone in a "bad neighborhood." We've been starting to have kids come in by themselves or with all of their friends. There must be a new halfway house or something in the neighborhood, because I've been noticing some dissheveled guys walking around talking to themselves, and one of them comes into the garden sometimes. Just as it's getting dark. He just sits there and smokes and sometimes talks to himself. Several times, I have gotten there at 8 in the morning and found someone who I don't recognize sleeping in the gazebo. The gazebo is well-constructed, but it is on top of a hole. It's a deep hole. It flooded about 4 times last winter. Imagine 8 feet of water just sitting there, rotting the steps and the edges of the hole. I thought that was hilarious, cuz I had tried to warn the people who dug it that that would happen. I don't go into the gazebo. But some people sleep on it.
Anyhow, this summer, some girls who are about 10-12 years old started coming by, and then some boys. They are always harassing the fish in the fish ponds (a hottub and a pink tub). The area around the hottub is not stable, and I am always worried that they are going to fall on the blackberry brambles or fall in! One Sunday, Jess told a kid that he could take a fish home- I had always been telling them no, cuz if one kid can have one, they all should be able to have one, and eventually the people who didn't get a fish won't have anymore fish to visit at the frickin garden! I predicted that in a week there wouldn't be anymore fish. I guess I was wrong.
Anyhow, sometimes people get to the garden and all of the plants have been pulled out of the hottub. Or sometimes there is a squash on the ground in an area where there are no plants. Or there are broken bottles near the bee boxes. While I was in Europe, people started finding shit in weird places, including in the hole (ha ha!), and needles- I think in the gazebo and in the hole. I have lost count of how many times I have gone into the garden and found the water running, flooding out a bed or, perhaps worse, watering the path!
People are also bothered by how sometimes on Sundays when people pick food and put it out front, one person will take all of the food without giving anything back. Well, we're not exactly asking for anything in return (I think it is better to let people come in and pick stuff themselves). But we do have water bills. A lot of days people take all of the eggs without contributing to water or chicken feed. People don't even bring the food scraps for our compost. But Jess keeps saying she's going to make signs. I don't want to be the bad guy to have to put a sign on every little thing in the garden, especially since I don't have any artistic skills, so I think people will have a problem with every little thing I do.
So James and Ayala are bringing a lock. It is a combo lock (easy to cut, note that I wrote this here but did not express this concern out loud). A sign will be put up. It will say to come by on a Weds. or a Sun. and meet us. Hopefully anyone who gives out the combo will show people how to turn the water on and off. I guess people also want to put a lock on the mailbox. If the water is still a problem, the little wheel thingie will be taken off the water spigot and we will have to use pliers. (I will have to get my own, cuz I know that this would be a fucking disaster!)
I wonder if the kids will climb over the gate, or if someone will cut the lock, or if the fence will be cut, or if someone will burn down the garden, or...there are so many things that could happen there that would make it so we would lose the garden. Imagine if something were to happen to one of the kids?! I worry about that all the time...
But anyhow, this whole idea of us mostly white gardeners putting a lock on the "community" garden in a predominately black and latino garden that had, less than 2 years ago, been an abandoned lot, just cracks me up! A lot of times I feel like we are acting like a charity instead of like a community project (putting food out rather than letting people come get it for themselves, not focusing on community outreach to get people to do stuff, having a difficult-to-negotiate entrance and an unsafe space with tools and glass and god knows what else all over the ground)... (If you) give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever. Ah, wasn't that sung by a nice, happy, funky hip hop group called Arrested Development?
posted by mahtin @ 11:18 AM
