My comment in response to a post where residents of a high-rise condo building said they want to have a community garden but management won’t let them because “liability” and “someone might get bitten by a snake”:
How disappointing. It’s a bad attitude on their part. And I don’t accept that insurance won’t allow that. This is the leverage point you guys have to work on: work on your management. Keep up the pressure.
Find as many like-minded residents as you can, and approach management together. You guys can do it! I know you can.
The snake thing is just silly. Snakes are just part of Florida, and anyone can get bitten by a snake anywhere anytime, theoretically, but in practicality, snakes hide and they really want nothing to do with us. If anyone should get bitten by a snake it’s me, constantly walking barefoot in my native & edible forest yard.
Official boards who use “liability” are using it as a stopper, they just don’t want to deal with it, but as more & more of you guys get together and raise your voices, and keep emphasizing the benefits, I think you will prevail.
You may even be able to get the landscaping company on board, because they’ll still be earning the same pay to landscape the non-edible areas. You do have to make sure they stop spraying herbicides, pesticides & other toxic stuff, otherwise your garden will be ruined.
Pay the landscapers to start adding native flowers and native shrubs; that will help with pest control and also help make sure beneficial insects are able to live there and help your food garden.
All of that said, sometimes for a condo it makes more sense to support local farmers and get delivery from Natural Concepts Revisited LLC, Keely Farms Dairy, Kelly Kretschmar, & others who deliver and/or offer CSA subscriptions, like a lot of us have started to do, than it would be to try to start a community garden where management isn’t friendly.
Long-term plan, if management is really unfriendly about lots of these kind of things, it may be time to bring in new management. Being hostile toward environmentally healthy options, when those are also the healthiest thing for people, it’s not a luxury we can afford any longer.
Best of luck to you, <community member> & everyone — and keep us posted on how it goes! Share on Beachside Neighborhood Watch if you like, you might attract some more support from residents of other condos and buildings nearby. There is strength in numbers!
More thoughts:
• In my first Permaculture Design Certificate course, back in 2005, co-instructor Larry Santoyo told us that his favorite permaculture designs are ones where there’s not a garden in sight. Not meaning that he hates gardens, just meaning that people have got a missed perception of Permaculture, because so many people focus on the idea that they have to grow their food by themselves. So what Larry was saying is, for example, that if you are a bunch of residents of a high-rise building, it may make more sense to support your local farmer than to try to start a garden on the premises.
• Personally, I would like to see the condo residents be able to do away entirely with the conventional landscaping. Mowing, purely ornamental shrubs and all that. Cut all of that out, and use the savings to let the residents have native and edible landscaping on the entire premises. Maybe part of the money savings could be used to buy extra insurance.
Important note for community activists:
If you are like me, and have put yourself out there as an activist and educator in your community, you may find yourself getting a steady stream of requests for your time and expertise. You may, like me, offer your services pro bono to marginalized communities in your area, as well as certain select public projects.
But: Many of the requests that come your way will come from people and groups who are quite wealthy not only in terms of money, but social capital/influence as well. YOU get to decide who gets your expertise for free, who needs to pay (and when those well-to-do groups push back against paying, which they typically do, feel free to send them to YouTube), and how much of your time & energy you choose to offer. Just because you have a passion and a mission for community resilience doesn’t mean you have to open a vein and show up with a shovel to their private project.
Not only have you put in the time and money for your education and apprenticeship and continued learning, but if you are like me, you have forgone a considerable amount of income over many decades in order to choose the path you have chosen, community educator. Please don’t be shy about either insisting on money* (or other compensation you prefer), or simply limiting the amount of labor you expend.
In the case of the above, I satisfied myself by offering my true best advice via posting my response to a post in a very large local forum where a lot of mainstream audiences will see it. In other words, I expended relatively modest labor for a potentially large community-awareness return. I have a personal stake in community resilience, and so the labor I expended to offer my best advice via that comment is a worthwhile trade-off for me. Bonus: I didn’t even have to leave my bed! It’s early morning, still dark and I haven’t even gotten out of bed yet. I would call that a win-win-win.)
* Regarding money, I’m getting away from the consulting model in general. When people aren’t willing to pay (whch, frankly, is appallingly often — People don’t even question that you would naturally want to show up for free, and in person yet!), I steer them to the vast realm of free info that’s out there.
And when people are willing to pay, I steer them to practitioners who are still in the thick of their income-earning years. Myself, as a person in her early 60s who owns her house free and clear, and has no kids or grandkids to support, I have the luxury of not needing to seek money. But, if I then offer my highest level of expertise and labor for free, not only will I be closing young people and marginalized people out of a potential income opportunity, but I will be perpetuating what I might call a norm of “toxic volunteerism.” (This is a phrase I just recently thought of, but it may already be a phrase in the world; someone out there may have coined it first.)