Guerrilla Gardening

Armed with trowels, seeds, and vision, the idea

 is to grow food everywhere. Anywhere.

© PrimalSeeds.org

An urban adventure at the threshold of nature and culture, taking back our own time and space, transforming the urban desert into a provider of food and a space where people meet face to face to discuss and participate directly in the remaking of their own towns and cities.

Growing food requires land. Look around you, it's everywhere. If not horizontal, it's vertical. There is always somewhere, your imagination is the limit, railway embankments, back gardens, golf courses, roofs, car parks, lawns, overgrown bits. The flower beds in your town centre could be growing your crops, right in the heart of the consumer landscape of burger bars, chain stores and supermarkets.

For politicians, city planners, landowners and developers alike, food growing as a land use is never going to take priority over housing developments, shopping centres, car parks and hotels. After all food can never hope to compete with this form of 'development' in terms of financial returns. By beginning cultivation on unused derelict land without consent of local authorities and other landowners we present a positive demonstration of community initiative and resistance to the set of priorities that sees our local environment as just another tradable good.

Today we may take for granted our cheap supply of our most basic need, food, but for this we are totally reliant on a chain of industries. Learning to produce our own food liberates us from the role of passive consumer remote from real decisions, alienated from nature.

While few of us wish to spend all of our time cultivating, there are low-maintenance, low-input plants and systems that can enable us to produce lots with very little time, trouble or money. These techniques are not difficult, they are outlined simply on this site, informing ourselves about them is the key to community self-reliance.

All green plants take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen and can greatly reduce air pollution in city neighbourhoods. Guerrilla gardening is about a lot more than food it is about reclaiming and improving the space we live in. Only by making ourselves seen and heard at local level can we hope to effect real change

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 © PrimalSeeds.org

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