Guerilla gardening

Yesterday I was at a housewarming party at my friend Sam's and had a chance to talk to Torsten about his guerrilla gardening project. I had never heard of guerilla gardening before I started this blog, but I have become interested in this phenomenon because it is a wonderful form of flower power and urban renewal. Guerrilla gardening means gardening on land which the gardener does not have a right to use. It can be an abandoned or vacant lot, ugly little spots owned by the municipality or anywhere that you do not yourself own and never asked to use. My friend Olivier has snuck some extras of his own beautiful flowers onto vacant lots when no one was looking. I have begun to notice that many people in my own neighbourhood plant extensions of their gardens in squares of earth set in the middle of the sidewalks. The ones that are not cultivated are inevitably eyesores which end up covered in ragweed and burdock. I biked through Outremont and the Plateau en route to the party and found that around Park avenue the city has filled out many of these bits of ground amid the stretches of asphalt with lovely although repetitive mixes of flowers. Cote des Neiges is not so graced, so it is up to our local guerrilla gardeners to make sure the area looks nice.

What Torsten has done, though, is quite extraordinary. He and a friend tackled an abandoned lot covered with the detritus of a burned down house, cleared it, and built a community vegetable and flower garden as well as a park, all done with no permission. They brought the local community into their project, and even won an award from the city. I have attached a link about guerrilla gardening in general, as well as an article about Torsten's project. I told him that I was interested in checking it out and writing about it in my blog.
http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ggtips.html
http://www.theunexpectedtnt.com/2009/04/tresspassers-in-st-henri-win-city.html

I also checked out his Facebook page on the St Henri garden, and found some interesting information including a link about striped cucumber beetles. This was timely because some of my cucumbers shrivelled up suddenly and I saw one of these cuties on one of my hot peppers yesterday, and put two and two together. Josh once again regrets not having bought mantis ooths this year again. We hoped the gravid female  mantises ("pregnant") we saw last year had successfully laid ooths but we have not seen any mantids yet. We also need to order ladybugs next year. I have them around and many hiberbated last winter in my old sunflower stalks, but they are not keeping the aphids off my apple and crabapples.