guerilla gardening

I love guerilla art but since I’m a green and I can’t knit or the like, I want to make Berlin a bit more colorful and ecological. A friend of mine and me wanna plant some pumpkin plants in parks or on traffic islands :-D

To Do List:
1. research southern california wildflowers and veggies that’ll grow here
2. make a pretty box to organize seed packets in
3. Start collecting seeds and organize
4. continue composting and MAINTAIN it
5. wait for the planting season

long time ago, i hired a rotivator to turn over a very large very overgrown garden. not knowing much about gardening at the time, or plants, i churned my way through lotsa big green leafy stuff. later i learned it was comfrey, a wonderful herb. but if you chop up the roots of comfrey and leave even a little bit in the soil it will regenerate and then you have lots more comfrey.

i moved on, but i wonder a lot about how that garden turned out. respect comfrey, i say. it’s a great fertiliser. now i stick with hand tools, and dig the weeds up one at a time.

It’s been fun, but the recent freezing weather has ended my guerilla gardening for this year.

Once again, the landlord of the place next door hired a mindless minion to weed whack. The remaining squash is now just a memory.

One the brighter side, the cantaloupes up on the corner are getting bigger and some are starting to change from green to a lighter brown with netting. At this point, it’s a race between the coming colder weather and their ripening. Chilly weather is coming early this year, so I don’t know if the cantaloupe will make it.

This is the crookneck squash that survived the weed whacking. Look closely and you can see the little squashes that I’ll leave on my neighbor’s front porch when they are ready.

Incidentally, I have been watering my plants from the rain barrel that I made a couple of weeks ago. I highly recommend rain barrels (and the water therein) for people who like to grow things!

When I first decided to plant a guerilla garden on the corner, it was nothing but dead, hard dirt. Ten weeks later, it is magnificently lush, growing edible purslane, Tuscan cantaloupes, and some very hardy flowers!

My neighbor caught the kidnapper of baby cantaloupes and squash and gave her hell! We still have no idea why she did this stuff.

Anyway, here’s a photo of the baby cantaloupes that have started since then. I hope they make it to maturity! You’ll have to click on the picture to make it bigger.

Check out this article I just found:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/05/339335.html

Oh, and I was not the only victim of plant hijacking—the same night that somebody took my baby cantaloupe, they kidnapped eight of my neighbor’s little spaghetti squashlets!

I have to say, my guerilla patch on the corner looks so lush compared to when it was just hardpan baking in the sun!

Some evildoer picked my little cantaloupe! It was green and much too small to be eaten, so it was a total waste! There are more babies on the vines, so maybe at least one will get to make it to maturity.