Growing Food With No Land and No Money

I just, I’m doing something here that I thought, well, I should show people what I’m doing, maybe I can inspire you. So I am gorilla, gorilla planting, and right now I’m here by this beautiful papaya tree, and it actually is a volunteer, and it’s a male, but I started taking care of it because I got dengue fever, and its leaves were hugely, hugely helpful in recovering from dengue fever. This is a, you know, there’s a friend of mine, Maria Benedetti, who’s a really well-known herbalist, who’s spent a lot of time with the Hebrew who live in the jungles and has learned a lot of medicines that’s probably lost, and I, afterwards, after it really worked, and I went online, I’m like, wow, papaya leaf, and there’s nothing available, but these people know.

Anyway, so in gratitude, I started taking care of the tree, I’m going to, I’ll say here’s a better view of this beauty, look at that gorgeous papaya tree, and it’s not a real long-lived tree, but then I started, you know, clearing out around it to, in gratitude, have pulled out a bunch of vines and other grasses and stuff, and I’ve been dumping my kitchen scraps, my compost here, to give to this tree, and then I said, hey, wait a minute, so now I have planted a couple of small baby trees, this one right here, it’s called a canepa, just a really nice tree that makes this beautiful little fruit, and here’s another one, so I got two canepa trees, and I’ve marked them, and I’m actually going to clear more grass away from this, the city will, some kind of kitties, they’ve come to help, make a video with me, how you doing sweetie? The city will come on this road from time to time, and just totally, weed whack the sides of the road, which is just kind of a nice service, so I want to, I’m going to go ahead and be proactive about clearing this out, and making sure that whoever does that work realizes this is something that’s being tended and cared for, so this land, I don’t know who owns it, nobody’s ever here, I can show you the neighbor land, oh hey kitties, yeah, what’s going on, you coming with, all right, yeah, see they, they get it cut every month, this is what they’re doing to their land, they absolutely strip it, so you can see here, they just cut every, every single thing down, so I’m not planting on that, right, now you might be saying, hey Marjorie, where did you get the canapa trees from, I don’t even have any money to buy canapa trees, I don’t even have any money to buy plants to do this, this gorilla gardening, so I’ll tell you where I got them from, so remember I’ve talked about building community through hosting events, and every other month here, at a little local cafe, where we have a small community garden, I host a plant and seed swap party, and there’s always extra plants that show up, and this, this last one, which happened just a few days ago on Saturday, a whole bunch of extra canapa trees showed a little canapa seedlings, as well as some other tomato starts, and all kind of stuff, so I, yes, nobody wanted them, you know, and I’m sort of the organizer, I’m left with this big box of plants, which I’m thrilled about, so I gave some, my neighbor Jose lives down that way a little bit, and I know he’s agriculturally minded, and so I gave him some canapa stars, and then my other neighbor who lives down here, his name is Kakko, I think he just drove by in one of these cars, anyway, he grows a lot of his own stuff, and I know he’ll really appreciate it, so I’m going to give him the rest of this, this box of plants here, which is another canapa, and you know, tomato, and miscellaneous.

There you have it, it’s called gorilla gardening, I’m, I’m gonna, you know, tend these guys, and as long as I’m here, and hopefully those trees will get to be of enough height that they’ll, you know, they’ll be fine on their own without me after probably a few months. The big papaya tree here that is, that is between it, this is not a long live tree, so right now, it’s kind of like what we call a nurse tree, that it’s just providing, you know, some shading and shelter, and actually it’s leaves I’ll be using for mulch, so, and that’ll be a tree that, you know, eventually is going to go, and these canapas, which are much longer lasting trees, will be here, and then this will be yet another food source on the, on the side of the road, you know, how long will it take to produce, I don’t know, I don’t know, two, three years, something like that, things go pretty rapidly here in the tropics, but the point is, is everywhere I go, I’m trying to get some food going in, and I’ve done that almost every other month with the plant and seed swap party, two months ago, there was a whole bunch of prickly pear that was left over, it was like a thornless variety, and I found places where nobody’s going to mess with it, and the prickly pear love it, and I planted prickly pear all over the place, you know, gay boy prickly pear, you know, one time we had dragon food, so I did that, so yeah, so it’s kind of just this perpetual community servicing, and eventually there’ll be a lot more, there’s a lot more food growing here, and I’m not, I live in an apartment, I mean, I, well, I mean, I’m sorry, I’m living in a rental without, without any place to really do any gardening, I got a little container gardening going on, so just wanted to inspire you, if you are in that situation, and you want to start doing something, this is, none of this cost any money at all, and I’m building community, and I’m getting food to grow in the local area, so I think it’s a win, win, win, win, okay, I’ll talk to you later, just a short inspiring thing, oh, by the way, oh, gosh, I can’t believe I forgot, let me pitch that whole, you know, go to backyardfoodproduction.com, and I’ll show you how you can grow about half of your own food in a backyard sized space, in less than an hour a day, and if you’re watching this on anywhere else, I’m really working on sub-stack, I’ve really decided I really like that platform, and I do a lot more content, and I have a lot more going on on sub-stack, so if you’re, especially if you’re watching this on YouTube, who has just been slapping me around a little bit lately, please jump over to sub-stack, go to, I don’t know what it’s under Marjorie Wildgrass, sub-stack.com, and yeah, and you’ll get all the stuff, and the latest stuff, and the freshest content, right off the vine.

Okay, talk to you later, this is Marjorie. [tr:trw].