I am here in Berkeley with Barath Raghavan who we spoke with earlier about the Quine.
We're going to talk to Barath about another topic, his project of guerilla gardening.
We will start with the garden he has on the rooftop of the institute where he works.
Barath, can you tell me what I'm looking at here?
Sure.
This is a manzano pepper.
It's a type of perennial pepper.
It's really spicey.
It's an annual in most places, but here in California it can grow perennially which is
kind of nice.
Most peppers you have to replant every year.
Most of the stuff that is here, actually everything that I have up here right now is edible.
That's kind of my focus in gardening that I want to plant things that people eat.
Have the workers here taken your lead in terms of getting cuttings and using the fruits and
so on?
I think so.
I think the researchers are slowly coming on board.
People are getting interested in it.
More than anything people come and sit up here which they never used to do.
Okay, so that is one of your gardening efforts.
Last time I was up here you were telling me about the guerilla garden.
Can you talk about that?
Sure.
I noticed a lot of places around the city, and this is true in a lot of cities, where
along the sidewalk there would be a strip of land, the sidewalk strip in front of buildings,
in front of houses where there is sometimes grass, there is sometimes plants, but in most
residential areas the city doesn't maintain it and so sometimes it's just a bunch of weeds
or just bare dirt.
I started with the apartment building that I live in.
The area in front of the building and on the side of the building was just packed hard
dirt with some weeds growing in it and I thought you know, it would be nice if there were some
plants here.
I didn't have any garden space of my own.
I had this rooftop garden, but rooftop gardening is always a little difficult because you're
still working in containers.
You can't just put the plants in the soil and have their roots 2:13 water so it takes
a little more maintenance when you are growing things in a rooftop garden.
So, I just started digging the soil partly to remove the weeds and then because it was
very dry dusty soil and it didn't have much in the way of nutrients I started adding coffee
grounds which is good organic matter, it has some of the nutrients plants like, from a
local coffee shop just a block away.
I told them hey, I'll give you a trash can.
Put your coffee grounds in this and I'll pick it up and put that on the soil and then the
earthworms can eat it and sort of turn the soil and use the coffee grounds.
They were totally fine with that because they were just putting them in the green waste
bin anyway so it wasn't any more work for them.
They were happy to sort of contribute to the local gardening.
I started doing that, and then I started planting trees in front of the building.
I planted a Redwood, but Redwood is actually the only non-fruit tree.
Pomegranate, avocado, mango, another pomegranate, persimmon, strawberry guava and another avocado.
That was in front of my apartment building.
When did you start this?
I guess about two years ago.
Okay, so they've had a little time to get established?
Yes.
The goal of sort of the way I'm picking plants and mostly fruit trees is I want them to be
things where after the first year or two I won't have to take care of them.
They will send their roots down deep, the winter rains that we get will be sufficient
to keep them going through the summer, and maybe without care they won't produce a ton
of fruit, but they will probably produce a decent amount.
Then the people in the community can just walk by and they can pick some fruit wherever
they are going.
It sometimes strikes me that cities put in a lot of ornamental landscaping.
They put in lots of whatever types of trees that are popular in your area.
Here there are a lot of maple trees, a lot of gingko trees, sometimes palm trees, and
a lot of shrubs of various types, and then the city does end up watering some of them,
and even if they don't end up watering them those trees then drop leaves, maple trees
drop those sort of spiky seed pods.
Some other types of trees drop sort of sticky things that like get stuck on the sidewalk.
They have all these sort of downsides, why not have them be something that is edible?
You might as well plant a fruit tree instead and you get fruit out of it, and you get the
ornamental value.
If you pick the right fruit trees that are sort of good for the climate then they will
take care of themselves after the first couple of years.
That's the approach I've been taking.
The most recent project isn't really guerilla gardening.
There are these student coop houses that are run by students that are sort of alternatives
to dorms and one of the houses was booting itself, it was sort of starting over.
I walked by one day and I was talking to the person in charge there and he suggested that
I would be welcome to help them figure out a new garden plan and so we've been doing
that.
That is sort of an ongoing project.
We're putting in about 30 fruit trees there.
The house shares its food so this is perfect for them.
They are going to have fruit that they get right from their own garden to feed the house
and decrease their cost too.
Did you invent guerilla gardening, or is this something that other people are doing because
I've never heard of it.
Lots of people do it.
Okay, lots of people are doing it.
Lots of people are doing this.
By its nature it's not organized.
People just sort of do it wherever they can with the resources they have at whatever place
they're in.
It's actually pretty popular in the East Bay so Berkeley, Oakland.
I would say a lot in Berkeley and Oakland, there are a lot of guerilla gardening projects
going on.
One project I've heard about in San Francisco that I found pretty interesting is some cities
plant non-fruiting varieties of fruit trees.
A lot of times they are species of trees that have both fruiting and non-fruiting varieties.
I think there are some for pears, pomegranate.
There are some varieties that don't produce fruit, but then there are others that do produce
fruit and so what people have been doing is they have grafting fruiting branches onto
non-fruiting city trees.
That's pretty guerilla.
The idea is that for those who don't know grafting you basically are splicing a branch
of one tree onto a branch of another tree and once that sort of splice heals then it
will start growing and producing whatever the fruit was of the new branch that you stuck
on there.
They will take a branch off of a good fruiting variety and then they will stick that on to
a tree of a non-fruiting variety that the city already planted and all of a sudden the
city tree is producing fruit.
That's kind of a neat approach.
Have they had any feedback from the city about this?
I don't think the city is happy about it, but I don't think it is easy for them to find
out.
The whole idea of guerilla gardening falls into I think a little bit of a grey area in
that some cities have very strict ordinances about what you can and cannot plant.
Some cities don't really have rules about this sort of thing, and sometimes they do
have rules but they're not well specified or well enforced and so it depends on where
you are.
Partly it's that very few cities are interested in going after people for guerilla gardening.
For example, in the case of the sidewalk strip the land is city land, at least in the case
of Berkeley but a lot of cities, they land between the sidewalk and the curb is city
land, but the burden for maintaining it is on the landowner of the adjacent parcel and
so you're supposed to take care of it anyway.
As long as the person there agrees planting fruit trees makes sense even though the city
for example has a list of things that they do and don't want planted and there are very
few fruit trees that are on the sort of preapproved list.
There has been a movement to actually get cities to allow more of this.
I think in LA, the city of LA and the county of LA, there has been a lot of effort put
into this.
There are several projects, guerilla gardening projects, in LA where people have been trying
to grow vegetables on the sidewalk strip in pretty blighted neighborhoods.
They first got a lot of pushback from the city and the city said we're going to charge
you to pull up all your stuff.
Eventually I think they have been getting the City Council to revisit those laws that
prevent people from growing vegetable in the sidewalk strip.
One of the reasons I don't grow vegetables on the sidewalk strip and by the street side
is because the soil sometimes has toxins in it.
Lead can accumulate because of years of lead paint of car exhaust back when we had leaded
gasoline, and that lead stays in the soil.
It then will leach into vegetables that are grown in that kind of soil, and it's not just
on the sidewalk strips.
Even sort of in many cities backyard soils will have lead in it and it's not good to
eat lead obviously.
What about the fruit trees?
The fruit trees as it turns out, lead does not accumulate in the fruit.
It can sometimes in the wood of the tree, but it doesn't end up in the fruit.
It's not quite this simple, but it has to do just with gravity.
Lead is a heavy element and it doesn't end up propagating very high into the tree whereas
greens that are right on the ground, it will get into the green but also the soil, the
dirt will end up on the leaves of your greens and if you don't wash them really perfectly
you will end up eating a little bit of that leaded soil.
That's why I don't like doing veges, plus it requires more maintenance.
A fruit tree once it is established it will take care of itself.
Yes, exactly.
Well, that is inspiring, and you did this just from walking around and observing and
interacting with your environment which I think is really great.
Thanks.