Urban Farming? In an East Harlem Housing "Project"?
Washington Houses. Between 97th Street and 104 Street, Second
and Third avenues. Allah took my wife's mother last year. For almost three decades prior to her passing she had maintained
a vegetable garden using space which formerly had served as decorative lawn space. (She did complain--a little--about having
no success with flowers.)
The New York City Housing Authority comprises more than 300 housing developments, all of them having decorative lawn
space. These developments house more than 7% of the population of New York City, more than 600,000 people. If there
is a catastrophic economic meltdown--PRODUCING A FOOD SHORTAGE--these people will be like people on a ship in the middle of
the ocean dying of thirst because the water around them is unfit to drink.
The decorative lawn space in the "projects"
can be made fit to produce food. The effort must begin NOW. I am not aware that any of my wife's relatives who still live
in or near the Washington Houses have continued the garden. This note is for them. I am offering to help although I live hundreds
of miles away.
BTW the namesake of the Washington Houses is George Washington--the land speculator, politician, slaveholder, and
soldier. Not Booker T. Washington, who advised newly freed New Afrikan slaves to: "Cast your buckets where you are."
(In the South, on the land.) And not George Washington Carver. Peanuts were a staple crop of my mother-in-law's mini-farm
in the "projects."
May Allah grant my mother-in-law the best of her deeds and grant that her progeny continue her good works.
