Register Your Garden with the USDA so they can Pubish a MAP

Local city garden lasted 2 years because people went in and took everything instead of picking and sharing.

originally posted by: mikell
Local city garden lasted 2 years because people went in and took everything instead of picking and sharing.

Our village donated seeds and 5 acres for our community garden. We grow so much produce, we give most of it to the St. Felix Pantry, Or Road Runner food bank. It's also a community meeting place where locals come to maintain the garden, sit on the tailgates of pickups, have a few drinks, watch the beautiful sunset, and discuss the pleasures of living in Paradise.

Sorry yours didn't work out. It's a beautiful thing when it does.

I don't think the USDA understands how we do gardening.

Every spring I crank up the little tractor and as soon as possible, till the garden. I try to till it at least twice before planting, with a few days to a few weeks between tilling. Then we (wife and I) go buy seeds we don't already have. We plant the garden and spend the next months weeding it, watering it, and trying to keep Evil Bambi and Evil Thumper from eating the plants as soon as they put on a leaf. We also keep an eye open for insects and remove them, either manually or using as natural as possible pesticides (that we have to buy).

Then when the garden starts producing, we harvest it, keep what we need, and donate the rest to neighbors, family, and friends. I tend to use some of it the same way I do my eggs... as tips for service workers who do a good job for me. I have in the past seen people I did not know but who were down on their luck and just gave them a few bags of fresh produce.

Note that I do all that with a 30% heart ejection fraction, about half of normal. I cannot even use a garden hoe; my wife does, but I have to simply sit down in the row and pull weeds slowly by hand. That's a lot of work, and no one except my wife really helps out. We also have to spend what costs there are out of a SS Disability check. No one is handing me money to help pay for the things necessary to grow that garden.

Thus, that garden belongs to me. It is mine. It grows on land that has been in my family for generations, using money I provide out of a fixed income, with the aid of physical labor from a disabled person. Charity is one thing, but I will fill anyone caught stealing from it with a plentiful supply of lead. If someone is hungry, they can have food by simply asking for our excess; they can no longer need food by trying to take it for themselves. Their choice.

In a SHTF situation, I will need that garden even more than I do now; as of now it is supplemental so we can have some of the fresh foods that we cannot afford... and I will point out that the primary reason food is so expensive to buy is the fault of... the USDA! So no, I will not "advertise" to those who are already too lazy and entitled to bury a few seeds on their own a method for suicide with an agency that has done absolutely nothing to make it easier for me to grow that garden or less necessary for me to grow that garden.

Some of you will likely complain that I am not being more generous. I am generous. However, I have a few friends who have, over the years, started to expect my generosity to the point where the garden was simply not sufficient for their own selfish "needs" alone, much less able to support us as well. So complain all you want, but stay out of my garden. Complainers do not receive any produce whatsoever; I consider that a humanitarian act, since I am giving them less in their life to become upset about.

I want to see the government agent who is big enough and bad enough to make me "register" (read: give to the lazy and entitled) my garden. I'm sure there's some that are able to do so; I do not doubt that. But to date, I have never met another human being big enough or bad enough to make that happen, and I would really, really like to see one before I die... which I probably would do protecting my garden. They have to be ten feet tall with five-inch-thick sharkskin! That would be one heck of a sight to behold!

TheRedneck