Let’s eat

While I’m in the mood of ideas I wanted to share this one….

It kind of offends and hurts my feelings to see council workers ripping out perfectly good gardens and trees simply to “beautify” our cities and towns.

Roundabouts are always replanted with pretty plants and if anyone’s spent some time in a nursery browsing the plants they’d know just how expensive this is!

Budgets of hundreds of thousands are devoted purely to the beautification of a town to get people liking it and visiting it and telling other people about it.

Meanwhile residents of that town struggle to feed their families each week.

Why don’t we spend all that money on edible plants most of which are still beautiful and the time used to care for the gardens which will serve a greater purpose for our community than simply looking good.

And heck our town would be talked about would it not?

Any money lost in people taking advantage of the “free” food would possibly be made up from people visiting “the edible city.”

It would bring people together and offer support to those in our communities who feel abandoned and left out.

Kids could pick an apple on their way to school, climb a mulberry tree and come home purple stained, bring home some strawberries for their ice cream….

It would be a massive learning curve for the kids in the community and why not get them involved? Health is such a concern and still we promote macdonalds, who could resist a juicy tomato as they strolled by? Most schools now try to have a vegetable garden and this would be an extension of that. Think city wide community garden.

If the government could get past giving something for free…..(so basically it would never be a reality)

Not everyone would feel comfortable claiming some fruit here or there or picking some beans…so I guess multi billion dollar companies like woolworths shouldn’t stress too much about the loss of revenue….but I know there would be families who’d appreciate being able to supplement their grocery bill with some fresh produce.

For anything like this to work there’d need to be a “if you take you must give” policy, tend a garden, pull some weeds…it may actually help the council do their own job…potentially ending up cheaper.

Well I think it is a good idea even if it is a little utopian/naive….

(I’ll be trying to work out what’s wrong with my blog as I haven’t been able to upload some beautiful photos…I have a feeling I may have reached my limit…photos soon once it’s sorted.)