When times get tough it’s time to get gardening! Actually, even when times are easy it’s time to get gardening. Even a small plot of land can produce a lot of benefit for you, your community, and improve where you live. Historian Dr. Kate Brown recently published a book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City about how little plots of land made bog changes in our modern cities.
After hearing or reading what Dr. Brown has to say I’ll bet you’re going to start plotting out your plot.
From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community.
This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.
Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.