“Hunger is 100% preventable, poverty is 100% reversible.” ~ Dattatreya Siva Baba
What is an “outrageous garden?” Spontaneous, organic, innovative, effective, tenacious, contagious, simple, easy and nutritious.
- 1. It’s a garden created within a container from easily obtained, local recycled materials or trash: tires, feed sacks, wading pools, 5 gal. buckets, empty oil cans (non-petrol), plastic tubs, concrete blocks, chimney flues, pipe sections, boots, wagons, old bathtubs, wooden boxes, etc.
- 2. Strategically located as close to the door of their caretaker’s residence as possible.
- 3. Quick and easy to set-up using a limited number of hands or labor and virtually no tools.
- 4. Requires minimum nutrient and water inputs: waste water/grey water collected from washing and food preparation; animal manures i.e. goats, rabbits, llamas, cows, horses, donkeys, chickens; grass clippings, leaves, dried plant materials, straw, moldy animal fodder or hay, vegetation of any kind for compost and mulch.
- 5. Planted intensely with both traditional and introduced high-nutrient vegetables and fruits beginning with donated seeds then through seed sharing. (I recommend a copy of Global Gardening by Hank Bruce and Tomi Folk.)
- 6. Provides empowering and intoxicating self-reliance rather than debilitating on-going dependence.
- 7. Inspires hope and creativity, generates abundance through simplicity.
Bag garden & Keyhole gardens (Courtesy SendACow.org.uk)
Tire gardens late summer New Mexico
Oooh. I love your ideas about the sources we can tap for containers to build a garden with. You are right – tending one’s own garden is very intoxicating, as well as eating the harvest that it gives us! Yum!
Go Yvonne! Great ideas. Thanks for the inspiration, and for doing what you’re doing.