– will corporate allotments be more than briefly fashionable?

We hope they will. The New York Times says growing food at work is a real trend. And it’s one our editor called for in his own town just the other month.

Will it last though?  There are so many reasons for it not to: liability worries, managers facing pressures to keep employees at their desks, disillusionment when things don’t grow, bugs.

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– guerilla gardening is just like buying a new car!

Or so Honda would have you believe.  Their newest Lexus campaign hitchhikes upon positive environmental developments in the world and links them to the latest Lexus hybrids.

An ad for the campaign — built around the slogan ‘Good things are happening today’ — in this month’s Wired features four newspaper clippings.  Two herald advances in environmental science, another trumpets a deal to preserve a part of the Amazon basin and the last is one of the many recent reports documenting the rise in popularity of guerilla gardening.  ‘The same spirit that drives these,’ says the ad of the news reports, ‘drives these,’ meaning the new autos, one of which has a base retail price of $105,000.

Nice try.  And, sure, hybrids are better than non-hybrids.  But it’s a mighty jump from greening blighted urban landscapes at the cost of a pack of seeds to gathering, shipping and processing the enormous volume of materials that go into even the greenest of cars.

It reminds us, as we’ve said before, that the greenest form of consumption is to avoid consuming wherever possible.

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– (you never promised me) a rain garden

Ah, now here’s an idea to warm (or perhaps wet) an ecologically-minded gardener’s heart: Rain Gardens.

Rain gardens, I guess, aren’t exactly new concepts.  But they are making ever more sense.

What are they?  Areas where you direct the runoff from your non-permeable surfaces (like your roof and asphalt driveway), essentially.   The idea is to stop potentially toxic runoff from racing into your local storm drain system.  Instead, you provide a place where it can pool temporarily and flow back into the underground aquifer.   So it’s an environmental win-win.

What the gardener gets is a rainy season wet area that, with the right planting ought not to become a mosquito breeding ground.  Instead an area that should support native meadow plants (which are used to wet and dry seasons).

If the idea intrigues you, here’s the place to go for more: www.native-raingarden.com.

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– gardening, as well as eating, like we’re at war

The ‘Victory Garden’ idea is getting a lot of play these days.  We’ve already noticed appeals for us to ‘eat-like-there’s-a-war-on.’

Now the UK Independent is excited by the same idea — hooking its version of the story on a new exhibit, ‘Dig for Victory: War on Waste,‘ at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms.

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– more of us are plowing up our lawns

“This year, 39 percent of people with backyards told the Garden Writers Association they planned to grow vegetables,” the Christian Science Monitor tells us.

Recent spikes in gas and food prices this spring are turning many in the USA to home-food production, it seems.

We welcome that, of course. We’ve been excited about the whole ‘eat your lawn’ trend for a while now.

The struggles we’re having with our own EarthQuaker garden (much of the plum tree just collapsed thanks to heat and too many plums), also have us looking forward to the renewed appreciation all this home farming should bring the people who do it professionally.

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– don’t worry, gardening can be like war

Reuters journalist Kate Kelland gets excited this week about guerrilla gardening, writing a way-over-the-top article about the phenomenon keyed to a new book on the subject.

“They work under the cover of night, armed with seed bombs, chemical weapons and pitchforks. Their tactics are anarchistic, their attitude revolutionary.”

And that’s just the start in a story full of ‘enemies,’ ‘attacks,’ ‘troops’ and ‘a win-win war.’

Partly, Kelland just gets stuck belaboring her (already hokey) metaphor. And she’s trying to be funny — reflecting a common journalistic inclination to belittle anything to do with gardening.

But is something else going on, too? In the eyes of mainstream journalists, does gardening — or anything else for that matter — need to be so conflict-ridden that it actually becomes warfare for it to be deemed interesting to their readers?

Maybe the people acting as guerrilla gardeners really see themselves in martial terms. If they did, that might be interesting. But there’s no evidence of that in Kelland’s piece. She certainly doesn’t question them about the need to see gardening as fighting. Instead, the need seems to be hers.

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– tax breaks for gardeners! Yeah!

if we want to encourage people to produce their own food, here’s a great idea:  tax breaks for gardeners!

It’s the idea of Maine gardener and sustainability advocate Roger Doiron.  He says:

There are different breaks that local, state and federal governments could offer home gardeners. Sales taxes on seeds, seedlings, fruit bushes and trees could be removed. Better still, an income tax break could be administered as is done with home offices where people measure and deduct the square footage of their houses used for business purposes. The bigger your garden, the better the tax break. Those with no yard could deduct the rental fee for a community garden plot.

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– eat your lawn, plant your street

Here’s more on the trend that we’re calling ‘super-micro farming.’

Firstly, Fritz Haeg has now published his “Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn.” You can find an except from it here.

But why stop at your lawn? Ruben Anderson, over at The Tyee, suggests that we plant the parking spaces in front of our houses. If everyone with a driveway actually used it, he argues, that would free up a ton of new public space. He imagines his own street:

“let’s make it a one-way street, one lane wide, with a couple of pullouts. This maintains access for emergency vehicles, taxis and mini-buses for wheelchairs. We could also throw four spots for visitors into each block. At one end we can put a half-court for basketball, street hockey, skateboarding or rollerblading so once again shouts of “Car!” will mean the players get a short break. For the rest of the block, I propose gardens.

If you can’t imagine your neighbors (or your city) going for the concept, you might be glad to know that elsewhere ‘asphalt gardening’ is already a reality.

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– forget guerrilla gardening, do it fairy-godmother style

Sure, we have reservations about turning vacant urban lots into vegetable gardens designed purely for the benefit of humans. But, as with all things, the real story lies in the nuance.

That’s why we admire people who take it upon themselves to replace human-designed but blighted urban landscapes (think: ivy-covered front yards and scuffed, litter-strewn sod) with spaces that offer both humans and native animals food — not to mention homes for said animals and a fair smattering of native plants.

Take orchards. The right selection of varietals set in an unmown native grass meadow can offer delicious food to people, birds, bees and other creatures and living space for plenty of native birds and insects, too. Plus it will look nice. If you are watering anyway, why not go that route?

That logic has Oakland social worker Diane Williams filling her front yard with fruit trees. Faced with the bare yards of her neighbors’ public housing development across the street, she went and offered to do the same for them. She now gardens 10 plots in her neighborhood and provides free fruit for anyone who cares to pick it.

While the San Francisco Chronicle calls her a guerrilla gardener, we’re not sure William’s qualifies — she does after all, ask permission.  She more like a fairy-godmother gardener.

Another article in the same edition of the Chronicle features more typical guerrilla gardeners — the kind that go plant in unused lots without permission. Interestingly, it sounds like landlords only get really upset when it’s food that’s planted on their lots.

While there’s something thrillingly paradoxical about the very notion of guerrilla gardening — which perhaps helps explain why it’s suddenly so hip — Williams’ model looks like the one to emulate for those of us looking to help cities achieve the urban landscaping triple whammy of increased food independence, wildlife protection and aesthetic improvement.

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– let’s eat like there’s a war on!

That’s apparently the idea behind British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s new project.

Oliver’s idea, explains today’s Guardian,takes “inspiration from the Ministry of Food’s campaign to encourage families to Dig For Victory, grow their own food and make the most of their wartime rations.”

While it’s a gimmick, the notion also makes some sense.  Second World War rationing famously limited Brits to tiny portions of meat, butter, milk and eggs, but it also resulted in a population that was remarkably healthy.  Plus it got people growing their own food right in their own backyard ‘Victory Garden.’  It many ways you couldn’t find a diet and lifestyle more likely to warm Michael Pollan‘s heart.

But can we persuade people to voluntarily impose war-like conditions on themselves — even if they stand to benefit?

For Americans one answer is that, of course, the country is at war right now.  So why can’t the nation ask such a sacrifice of its citizens today?

Another, more global approach might argue that the lifestyles of even the richest of us aren’t (on the whole) doing us a lot of favors when it comes to our collective health and happiness — let alone that of the planet.  So surely we could be doing better.

It sounds like Jamie Oliver recognizes that people are busy and don’t necessarily yearn to feel tied to their kitchens or gardens.  As he told the Guardian:

“This isn’t about me wagging my finger at people, here or anywhere else, it’s about finding out what problems people are facing with time, budget and cooking know-how,” said Oliver. “Then we can see what help and support they need. Yes, people should take responsibility for their own health, but they need help and the tools to fix it.”

We’ll look forward to seeing what tools the energetic and talented Mr. Oliver will come up with.

If it starts receiving serious educational and even heavy-hitting policy support worldwide, perhaps there’s real potential for a return to the ‘victory garden’ model — beyond Mr. Oliver’s pitch for his next TV show.

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