This is where he started:
This is a subject somewhat close to my own heart. Everyone has to eat, but when you're poor it's hard to afford fresh vegetables and fruit because they cost more than processed crap. There are a bunch of reasons for that, like vegetables and fruit being more perishable than gummy bears so they have to be transported to market quicker and sold quicker and tomatoes don't have the same subsidies as high fructose corn syrup. And it's not that agri-business outlawed growing gardens in parkways, the city did that due to cultural reason that said parkways should be grass lawns and not gardens. No one plotted to made it difficult for poor people in the ghetto to get fresh, healthy food but there are factors at work that lead to that.
Anyhow - what he says is right - a dollar's worth of seed multiplies into many, many more dollars of food, and it's fresh, healthy stuff. Gardening is healthy exercise. Gardening gives you the freshest food you can get. You also don't need to grow it on a formal farm. You just need a patch of dirt. There's a hell of a lot of land in a city (especially in sprawled-out US cities) and you can grow a lot of local food there. Gardening doesn't mean people grow ALL their own food, they don't stop buying industrially produced food, but it does bring healthy stuff to the people.
Best of all, for something like this it doesn't cost the city a damn thing. This is ALL volunteer. Not only that, but the city no longer has to worry about cutting down out-of-control weeds or cleaning junk out of these places - the gardeners take care of that.
And, frankly, a garden, even a somewhat shaggy one, looks a hell of a lot better than a vacant lot with scattered junk all around it.
Now, yes, there ARE downsides to urban gardening. Mr. Finley actually wants people to take the food that grows on his parkway but some other folks want to keep what they grow. There are problems with vandals, the usually problems of pests and drought or flood or plants that just up and die for no good reason you can see. But hey, that is part of gardening, too. Nothing teaches you that "shit happens" quite like attempting to grow something to eat on your own.
One of the reasons my spouse and I have been able to eat enough and eat healthy while being poor is because I have a garden. Sure, sometimes we get tired of eating a lot of chard (seems to be the most productive thing I grow) but all summer we have fresh stuff coming in, and hell, we're still eating last year's snap beans other things out of the freezer at this point. The money I save on not having to buy these things means more for, say, high quality protein or other items we can't grow but need to buy. Or maybe a few more pennies for something totally practical like toilet paper.
And finally - people need growing things around them to stay mentally healthy. In Antarctic bases we have hydroponic gardens that are considered essential for mental health as well as physical and staff spend some time just sitting with the growing things. Yet somehow we ignore the people living in cities nearly bare of growing things for years on end. Gee, wonder if that has an effect on those folks?
Anyhow, just wanted to share a story about someone trying to make a small corner of the world a better place.
Oh, and some of the flowers you see mixed in with everything else? They're to make people smile. Nothing wrong with a little beauty.
