Outrageous Garden

If urban sprawl eats up farmland as it does in the City of El Paso, then locally-grown food becomes less and less available. You can look at agricultural reports for the County of El Paso at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond and you will see plenty of vegetable farmers up until the 1940s. Increasingly then - especially with federal subsidies - farmers turned to cotton or perhaps pecans. With the rise of the supermarket, locally-grown became almost an oxymoron everywhere in North America.

One solution to urban sprawl is urban farming or community gardens. Yvonne Scott of Albuquerque, New Mexico has developed what she calls the Outrageous Garden - a simple garden utilizing recyclable kiddie pools or vehicle tires to create the garden space and good soil along with some tender loving care. Her idea will soon be put to work in Albuquerque. Yvonne tells us that on

"March 21st if you're in the Albuquerque, NM area, you can participate in creating a community garden on the site of a former parking lot utilizing recycled materials and above-ground gardening systems. These designs come from all around the world, are cheap, easy to set up and maintain, productive and efficiently utilize limited available water and nutrients."

Scott is motivated by her desire to do something about poverty and hunger. "Hunger is preventable. What's important is to provide options for those without access to a tillable land base, a backyard or community garden."

Her workshop on March 21st will show you "how to create a simple food growing system nearly anywhere."

Cutting-edge landscape architect and owner of Quercus, David Cristiani says that Yvonne Scott has "nice ideas to bring food into the landscape and create something better than the 'NM rockscape' as she calls it."