By Fine Print Staff
About 10 self-identified guerrillas went on a reconnaissance mission of the area surrounding Southeast Fourth Avenue and Main Street on Saturday, April 10. Bombs in hand, we scoured the area.
With seeds.
From fast-growing summer veggies to Florida wildflowers to culinary and medicinal herbs, our Guerrilla Gardening workshop turned into an insurgency of the downtown area.
The workshop, which I facilitated, made up the April edition of the Gainesville Urban Homesteading Project. The ongoing project aims to provide workshops and skills concerning self-sufficiency, sustainability, frugality and ethnoecological wisdom to urban residents.
While Guerrilla Gardening might not seem to have much in common with homesteading, the two practices are ripe with similarities.
Guerrilla Gardening is the practice of finding a fertile piece of land within an urban environment and gardening it– regardless of who the land belongs to. Typically the land is in a public space and gardened with the intention of offering that space and its fruits to everyone in an effort to challenge the mainstream ideas of land ownership and use.
During the workshop, participants made seed bombs by combining moist, composted manure with flour and seeds to form a sticky ball, teeming with potential flora-to-be. We then wandered around only a couple of blocks, noticing the abundance of fertile land, which before had only been appreciated by the most common and prolific weeds. We stealthily scattered our little bombs of hope, catapulting some and dropping others only inches from our feet. We seed-bombed empty lots, street medians, business lawns, dirt mounds and long-abandoned garden plots, then quickly regrouped on my front porch to talk guerrilla-gardening etiquette and philosophy.
The most obvious reason one resorts to guerrilla gardening may be self-sustainability. But there are plenty of other viable reasons to spread the herbaceous love.
First is the idea of providing local organic food, accessible to anyone who happens upon a plot. Guerrilla gardening creates an intersection between self-sufficiency and a deeper-rooted class struggle, as the gardens offer a healthy option for all people. Another reason may include bioremediation, which is the use of plants and microorganisms to naturally consume and break down pollutants in an environment. Plants are also very helpful in breaking up those pesky concrete slabs that don’t seem to serve any purpose. Growing plants in public spaces also sows the seeds of synergy, understanding and communication.
Which comes full circle to the idea of urban homesteading. The mission of the Gainesville project, manifested by Mary Doyle, is to “organize hands on, accessible workshops designed to share our skills and resources for creative self-reliance and a more sustainable urban community.” Mary admits the project is “a work in progress.”
“It was the awareness of my own ignorance that inspired me to initiate this project,” she said.
Originally the intention of the urban homesteading project was to begin reclaiming lost skills and forgotten knowledge once necessary for survival. As the project has evolved, a skill-share model has unfolded, based on the theory that everything we need to survive and thrive as individuals and as a community is already here and we can “do it ourselves.” As the project continues to take form, new meaning and purpose arise.
One purpose of the project is to enrich the local economy and cultural ecology. One of the first workshops hosted by the Gainesville Urban Homesteading Project was a lesson in beekeeping. As a result, 130,000 new bees were introduced to Gainesville, creating 13 new colonies, all working diligently to pollinate the gardens and wild flora of the local biotopes.
“Let us remember that we have honey bees to thank for pollinating about one-third of all the food we eat,” Mary says. “If all goes well for these local neighborhood apiaries, we may have a million honey bees working hard to cross-pollinate our food and flowers while making us honey. This concept of cross-pollination is a great metaphor for the work of the Urban Homesteading Project in general.”
Another aspect of the project is the preservation and adaptation of folk crafts. By learning to make useful objects, such as candles, clothing, dishes, tools and jewelry, urban homesteaders can feel confident relying on their own creative ingenuity, rather than depending on Wal-Mart and Target to deliver.
“This has the potential to invigorate our local craft economy while simultaneously reducing our use of fossil fuels to import our consumables from across the globe,” Mary said.
Another gathering led the urban homesteaders to the Dare to Dream Alpaca Farm in Newberry. We were able to witness the shearing of several alpacas and buy the wool directly off their backs. Afterward, we learned the traditional art of spinning wool by making a drop spindle out of wooden craft dowels, old CDs and wax. We progressed from spinning the less accessible wool to spinning ideas of making yarn out of grocery bags, bicycle tubes and any other waste product we could think of to create beautiful samples of modern craft.
Last, yet equally important, the Gainesville Urban Homesteading Project focuses on survival.
“Maybe our money will continue to save ‘us’ from droughts, floods, earthquakes, not to mention human violence, but I doubt it,” Mary said. “It is the last frontier of our privilege to remain ignorant, imagining ourselves safely insulated from the hardships being experienced by so much of the world.”
