Stuff You Should Know - How Guerrilla Gardening Works

Episode Date: December 4, 2008

You've heard of guerrilla fighting tactics, but how much do you know about guerrilla gardening? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about this "revolutionary" gardening trend. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. Chuck's with me. Say hi, Chuck. Hi. And I know it titillates Chuck when I say this, so welcome to Stuff You Should Know.

60 episodes in and we're introducing the show as the show. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, you've got to try new things sometimes. Devolve. I like it. Yeah. Pretty soon, I'll just start making up new names for it. We'll be like, wait, did I download the right one? Yeah. So, Chuck, as I am usually want to do, I have an anecdote from my past that will nicely segue into what we should talk about today. I like these because I don't know about these beforehand. I really don't,

so they're always interesting. By comparison, it's not that good, so don't get your hopes up. When I was a slightly younger man in my early teens, I had a friend named Jeremy whose dad was a firefighter. I knew he was this tough guy, but he also was fairly cultivated, cultured. He and his friends, some of them firefighter buddies, used to go out at night and engage in what they called clumping. All right. Now, and I've never heard of it before or since. I think they made it up, actually. But clumping involved going into somebody's yard and stealing plants that you liked,

and then taking them back to your yard and planting them there. Right. It's a nice thing for a firefighter to do, I think. Exactly. Yeah. Well, you know, if he's saving lives, I think he can kind of get something of a pass, but it always struck me as a little wrong, maybe? Yeah. Well, stealing. It is stealing, quite clearly. But at the same time, it's like, it's even more than stealing. It's not like stealing somebody's cell phone. You don't have anything really attached to that, except maybe your phone book in it. This is, you know, somebody's cultivating a garden. Somebody's taking the time to

plan this and intend to it. Now, all of a sudden, there's huge holes filled with dirt. You're stealing their time. You're stealing their money that they put into the planting. Sure. Now comes the segue. You want to know what the opposite of that is? I have a good feeling. I know it is. Gorilla gardening. That's precisely right. And Chuck, now, I know there has been some discrepancy in the very recent past. We're talking the gorilla as in like gorilla warfare, right? Right. Not the apes gardening. Although gorillas aren't apes, are they? I can never remember. I don't know. I know they're primates. Let's go with that.

Sure. Okay. So, yeah, we're talking gorilla gardening. And it is pretty much what it sounds like. It's, you know, making stealth maneuvers into usually untended areas or neglected or overgrown vacant lots, that kind of thing. And, you know, tilling the soil, weeding it and planting new stuff. Yeah. I think this is really, really cool. I do too, because it's subversive, which, you know, I'm very hip to, like, you know, the smart mobs thing. Right. But it doesn't harm anyone. It doesn't harm anyone. No. As a matter of fact, it makes the world or the city or wherever you live and you're doing this a much better place. Right. Although some people still try and shut

it down, which we'll get to later. Yeah. Good. Because I got a great line for that. Okay. Yeah. So, you want to give a little background, a little history on gorilla gardening? Yeah, sure. Originally, I believe it started in New York City in the early 70s. The modern, the modern version did, yes. Right. Do you have info on the ancient version? Apparently, it goes back to 1649. Okay. When a guy named Gerard Winston Lee, I believe, he's from Surrey, England, he started a group called the Diggers. And they were basically the first gorilla gardeners. They just went into places that they didn't own plots of land they didn't own and started planting. I wonder if they were planting crops, actually, to feed them.

They were planting vegetables, yes. Right. Yeah. Well, the modern version started in the early 70s in New York and there was a resident there named Liz Christie. And she founded the Green Gorillas. And they started hitting up local lots and planting flowers. And the first one, I believe, was at the corner of a bowery in Houston Street, which I know well. And did you know bowery is actually Dutch for farm? Really? Yeah. Maybe that's why they picked it. I found it on the Green Gorillas website. Oh, cool. Yeah. So they, Christie and the Green Gorillas actually kind of had a hard fought struggle at first, that that place at the corner of Bowery in Houston, that little house in sorry, that little neglected park, right, that no one

cared about. All of a sudden, now that they're tending to it and planning stuff, they had, they had a fight on their hands with the city, I believe. I didn't realize that, actually. Yeah, they had something of a struggle. And finally, the city gave in, saw the error of its ways after about a year and legitimized it and became this community garden. And now it's a memorial park dedicated to Liz Christie. Very cool. Next time in New York, I have to go by. She was the one who originated seed bombs. Yeah, these are really cool. And originally, she was using condoms filled with tomato seeds or some kind of seeds and like compost and then, you know, hurling them into a vacant lot or something like that. Interesting. And the condom would disintegrate? No. No. So they

didn't work? I mean, it worked. I think the water would get into it or something like that, or maybe she slid it. But even after the stuff planted, you still have a prophylactic laying around, which really vacates up a lot, you know? Have you been to New York City, though? I have, but not since I was young. Yeah. The condom on the street isn't the strangest thing. Right, no. I've seen quite a few. But there are greener ways to do it, right? Yeah. I think nowadays, the seed bomb is evolved into a clay mixture with like some clay and compost and seed and water. And you just form it into a little ball and you can just literally, you can toss these from your car. And it has to be something obviously that can grow from not having to dig

and plant it into the ground. But yeah, it's a seed bomb. Pretty cool, huh? Yeah. And apparently, they're dried out. And then when it rains, the thing kind of reconstitutes or dissolves, and then the seeds are spread, and there's this compost that feeds it. Right. Ideally, I think the seed bombs are done either in the rain or before it rains, right before it rains. That's very cool. Yeah. And like you said, you can throw them from a moving car or, you know, just kind of drive around and you're just, you know, gorilla gardening, gorilla gardening, gorilla gardening, spreading beauty. Yeah, exactly. And I saw a cool video on the Guardian's website of a guy named Richard Reynolds. Yeah. Did you see him making seed bombs? Yeah. There's a great

how to video. If any of you guys out there in podcast land are interested in making your own seed bombs, there's a great how to step by step video with Richard Reynolds. Right. And you're absolutely right. He is a cool dude. He's a very cool dude. While we're on Richard, he was the founder of the London Gorilla Gardening Movement, from what I understand, and has a great website, GorillaGardening.org. Yeah, it's pretty much like the definitive Gorilla Gardening website. I know on a Google search, if you type in Gorilla Gardening, it's definitely the first one that comes up. Yeah, which is good. Seems the most legitimate as well. Yeah. He actually, I read a cool thing on his website today where he had been taken care of. It may have been his own apartment complex.

Yeah, it was. His own. Yeah. The horse and elephant or the buggy and something or other. I love the names for the apartments in London. It's pretty cool. It's very cool. There is no need for the outside world because we are removed from it and apart from it and in our own universe. On the new podcast, The Turning, Room of Mirrors, we look beneath the delicate veneer of American ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure, George Balanchine. There are not very many of us that actually grew up with Balanchine. It was like I grew up with Mozart. He could do no wrong. Like he was a god. But what was the cost for the dancers who brought these ballets to life? Were the lines between the professional and the personal were hazy

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The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that will piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So yeah, he was had been taken care of his own garden there and eventually got the residents had been paying money toward maintenance, lawn maintenance. And basically, the residents started to say, Hey, this is kind of fraudulent.

This guy's been doing this for free. We're paying money for nothing. Right. And he actually got refunded the 90 residents. Yeah, their money refunded for like a three year period. Yeah. And it's about 100 pounds and everything was going swimmingly after that. He had some sort of at least verbal consensus between the paid groundkeepers, the building's owners and himself that he would take care of this area, this common area. Right. And he's doing a heck of a job. The guy has, you know, he's a great gardener to begin with. But as long as he gave the management a month, a month's notice that he was going to stop so they could get the company back in there to do their, you know, terrible job of taking care of it. Right. So he's got this agreement and then

all of a sudden things just go sideways and he's got problems again. And the one problem, you know, it's mind boggling to me. If you have a vacant lot, if you have a common area, if there's a place where it's just being neglected and then somebody very, very benevolently just starts taking care of it, plants it, what's the problem? I know. But the problem is, is there is gorilla gardening also kind of inadvertently serves as a slap in the face to people who are very interested in rules and procedure and know like their county code enforcement's phone number by heart. Right. Right. And that's all you have to do is call code enforcement and all of a sudden this great act is now criminal. Right. Which it was in the first place, but everybody kind of

looks the other way. Right. Did you see the video on his site where they got shut down? No, I didn't see that. Yeah. It's on YouTube as well. And it's on his website and they were actually tending to a, an area underneath a street sign, I believe in London on a corner. And at night, usually it's gardening at night. Thanks to REM. We can give them a little shout out and they do this undercover the night quite often and the cops came by and they shut them down. It's all on tape and he gets into a little minor argument with them that they're beautifying the area and the cops and these, of course, these are cops in London. So it's all very polite, you know, the United States would go down much differently. I'm sure. And eventually they,

you know, they actually left because they threatened to arrest them and, but they snuck back a couple hours later and finished the job. Good for them. Yeah. And, and yes, I noticed there's like clips and photo documentaries of like him all over the world. Yeah. Doing like guerrilla gardening. Yeah. And it is all over the world. I saw that there were sites in German and Australia and here in the United States, there are a lot of groups. And like you were pointing out, we don't, or I pointed out, we don't have one here in Atlanta. But you mentioned that, you know, necessarily have to have a group, an organized group that does this in a website. You can, you can do it on your own. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't get much more low tech than,

than seed bombs. Sure. You know, and you could, like you said, just drive around, throw them out the window, see what happens. But yeah, you could go so far as to organize a group. Right. Well, which is kind of the cool thing. I think it goes a little bit beyond just the gardening and beautification. A lot of times it's bringing the community together in a cool way, just like when you, there's groups that go around and pick up trash, that kind of thing. Yeah. Now, I know on Reynolds site, there's something called troop digs. I think it's like the forum. You can go and find out who's digging in your area, where they're going to be, that kind of thing or who you need to contact. And, and some people from what I've read about

Reynolds, he is completely into beautification. That's his only motive. Right. But there's, there's also a very political aspect to it, to gorilla gardening. It's, it can be a form of protest. Sure. Of, you know, capitalism of, of urban blight. Right. That kind of thing. The city won't take care of, of itself. So we will. Right. Exactly. And also, like food costs, it can be a protest of that. Right. Um, and actually there's this guy in, uh, I believe Boulder, Colorado, this past summer, his name was Scott Hoffenberg and he got selected the $2,000 a day fine for gorilla gardening. Really? And the reason he was doing it, he said was, uh, because food prices had gotten out of hand. So he and a neighbor took up this little right away. You know, the little strips

in between the sidewalk in the street, they just planted a bunch of, uh, cucumbers and tomatoes and squash and all this kind of thing. And, um, that some, some, one of those people with rules and procedures called the code enforcement. So luckily the, the county said they were going to try to work with the guy and I never, I didn't hear what happened, but I have a feeling that if you're a gorilla gardener and you're gardening actually right out front of your house and they're threatening a $2,000 fine, that would probably go a long way to get you to comply with those rules and procedures. Yeah. You know, I'd like to pick someone's brain who's really against this. Yeah. I want to meet the person who sees what's going on and goes home and

is just fuming. How dare they plant those flowers right there. You know, I'm just, I'm curious what's, what's happening there. Yeah. And I don't think I could explain it, but I know for a fact I've met people like that before. It's always a little unsettling. These are probably the same people that are, uh, the neighborhood associations that, uh, just flip out when someone's mailbox looks different than the rest. Yeah. Those, those people are a lot of fun. I used to have a friend who lived in my subdivision and his family routinely got, um, letters from the neighborhood association to, you know, move the water skis out from in front of the garage and that kind of thing. It was crazy. It was weird. Um, so, but okay. So Chuck, both of us have expressed an

interest in gorilla gardening. Let's say somebody who's listening to us, you know, wants to get started. Not everybody's against this. Right. And actually from what I understand, um, local nurseries have a tendency to really kind of support this kind of thing. Yeah. You know, the half dead plants that nobody's going to buy anyway that may or may not come back to life. Why not? So what should, what should people look for when they're doing this? But I just want to point out this very nice impersonation of a half dead plant. You just seem like to help me. Yeah. I wish people could have seen that. Um, well, first thing you want to do is find out, you know, identify your location

of where you want to do this. So look for a, like you said, sometimes those little strips of land between the street and the sidewalk that are full of trash or grown over with weeds. Those are good spots, corners that have those. And, uh, then you want to, uh, find out what kind of plants you want. Uh, indigenous species are good. Non-invasive. Non-invasive. You don't want to like plant the new Kudzie or anything. Right. Which for you, non-southerners is a, uh, very fast growing, uh, weed that just, that just takes over absolutely everything. Right. It can kill an 80 foot oak tree in a year or two. Right. Thank you. Japan for that. Exactly. Uh, so yeah,

you want to pick out the right plants and you also, I mean, you're going to be, it's not like you just plant this and then you just leave forever. I mean, if you really want to do it right, you want to upkeep it. So if, uh, you don't have a ton of time, you want to pick some plants that require as little upkeep as possible. Yeah. Like drought resistant plants. Yeah. Because the law of comments, everybody wants to take as much out of this common pool and put as little back as possible. Right. Well, as far as economists would say. Exactly. Um, so yeah. So if you have drought resistant plants, you can,

you know, leave it up to the universe to take care of it. Right. I hate that ad. I know. Uh, so, uh, yeah, you've got your plants. You've, you need to get your plants. You can ask for donations, uh, or you can buy them yourself if you've got a little extra cash. Uh, gather up a little team or if you just want to do it yourself, if it's doable by yourself. And then, you know, you go out, a lot of people do it at night. Um, here in Atlanta, I think in my neighborhood, I could go out in the middle of the day and no one would. Oh, totally. No, same here, I think as well. And there's plenty of, uh, lots around my house that I could, yeah, me too. Let's do that. Well, maybe we should. All right. And if any of you

out there interested in getting into guerrilla gardening, uh, we would suggest checking out guerrilla gardening.org, Richard Reynolds site. He also has a book, um, based on the, uh, advice of chairman Mao and Shagabara, but about guerrilla gardening. Uh, and of course you would also be interested in visiting our humble website. You can type in guerrilla gardening in the search bar on howstuffworks.com. And Chuck, what do you have for us? Do we have any, uh, listener mail? Yep. We have some listener mail. Listener mail time. So, uh, this, uh, letter, Josh comes to us from a lady named Leah Johnson. Great. And, uh, Leah says, uh, I liked your how eco anxiety works article. And I also liked how you mentioned the vulture vomit at the end. Oh yes. This is a good

letter. Right. Uh, I have in fact been puked on by a turkey vulture and it was disgusting. I was part of a raptor rehabilitation program and we had outdoor housing for them, which we cleaned out once a week. Every time I went to get the turkey vulture out so we could clean it out or just to give him some time outside, he'd panic and puke all over the, over the place, including on me. Uh, fortunately, I always had on gloves when handling the bird. So the acidity wasn't so much a problem as a terrible smell from the bird of prey diet. We were feeding him anyway. Thanks for making my days better by giving me something interesting to listen to and yada, yada, yada. We love you. That's great. Well, Leah, because you, uh, send in your listener email and, uh, because of your selfless care of

birds of prey, we're going to send you our set of how stuff works steak knives for you and yours. We hope you enjoy them. And if anyone else, anyone else out there wants to send us an email, you can send it to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. Send it. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off the cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being

robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Attention, bachelor nation, he's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all. And now he's telling all it's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.