Survival Gardening For Beginner's Article

Good morning felllow MSF members. I stumbled across this older post again (2018), >>HERE<< and felt like sharing it! Growing your own food is a valuable prep, as well as a natural stress reducer!

 

"Only Two States Have Passed ‘Right to Garden’ Laws. Will Others Follow?"

https://civileats.com/2022/08/20/tw...ommunity-nutrition-security-illinois-florida/

"From Michigan to Massachusetts, people have been thwarted—or even outright banned—from growing food on their own property. But thanks to the concerted efforts of people like Virgil and their legal allies, “right to garden” laws are slowly gaining traction. Such legislation remains scarce at the state level, however—only Illinois and Florida have laws on the books, although Maine recently updated its constitution with a “right to food” amendment.


"In the spring of 2011, Julie Bass installed several raised beds in the front yard of her suburban property in Oak Park, Michigan. Bass quickly learned that her gardening efforts, intended to teach her kids about growing their own food, had provoked the ire of her city. Bass was cited with a civil misdemeanor for not planting 'grass, shrubs, or other suitable live plant material.'

“ 'I was left thinking that they took a pretty broad and unwarranted interpretation of that code,' Bass wrote on a blog she started to document her experience. When Oak Park officials threatened to prosecute Bass with a more serious criminal misdemeanor, which would potentially come with a 93-day jail sentence, she took her story public. (The charges were ultimately dismissed.)

"Bass’s experience is unfortunately not unique. City regulations, homeowners’ association guidelines, and other ordinances have often been invoked to force gardeners to remove their plants. The arguments put forth against gardening have been myriad and occasionally baffling: greenhouses reduce property values, raised beds do not conform to the aesthetics of a well-tended yard, and vegetables growing in the ground are unsightly, among others. Such criticisms tend to be rooted in discrimination, said Ari Bargil, an attorney with the Institute for Justice who has represented several gardeners. 'These are classist restrictions that are designed to make neighborhoods look a certain way.'

" Nicole Virgil is well aware that shepherding a bill through at the state level is a time-consuming and challenging process. She and her husband spent years fighting for their right to garden.

"After growing summer crops such as corn and tomatoes for a few years in their backyard in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst, Illinois, Nicole and Dan Virgil accepted that their gardening efforts had morphed into a year-round obsession. But faced with notoriously windy and frigid winter conditions, the Virgils decided to erect a temporary greenhouse—a hoop house.

"The 9-foot-tall structure buffered young plants from the wind and prevented them from getting buried in snow. Without a hoop house, it’d be futile to grow much in winter, said Virgil.

"However, a neighbor soon complained. The hoop house was unsightly and its plastic membrane rattled in the wind, they reported in 2015. The Virgils removed the structure at the request of the city, but the idea of giving up on homegrown winter vegetables rubbed them the wrong way. For years, the dispute festered in the community, and city officials held firm despite testimonies from Virgil’s supporters. The city of Elmhurst started to bring lawyers to meetings, said Virgil. 'They had lawyers standing behind lawyers over the threat of us growing cold-hardy crops through the winter.'

"Elmhurst officials also began circulating photos of the Virgil children selling homegrown vegetables. They were suggesting that we were running an illegal farm business, said Virgil. 'It’s the closest thing I’ve seen in real life to that movie ‘Erin Brockovich.’”

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Post SHTF, should these folk who oppose gardening show up at your door asking you to share food, get rid of them ... by any means necessary.
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