It’s a relatively modern problem, where you, a scrappy solarpunk with no money, want to begin a vegetable garden. The ground you have to work with is either dead as hell or flat out toxic or has no dirt at all. You want to build a raised bed but you have no money and the kits are expensive. There’s a lot of ways to go about this, here’s what I did: I built a wicker basket.
Step one: assemble your branches.
You want whippy ones at least 4’ long, no thicker than two fingers, no thinner than a chopstick. Longer and bendier is better, but also get a bunch of thick stiff ones. I got mine from the Greenway near my lil condo, and from my neighbor’s yards.
Protips: Wear gloves, because thorns. Carry clippers discretely, because people get nervous when they see sharp shiny things in your pocket. The branches in the above pic are one load of three, because that’s how much I could carry.
Step two: hammer your stakes
(no pic for this part, sorry)
Take the thickest and straightest of your branches, and cut a length you want to be the height of your box plus a couple inches extra. Hammer them into the ground every 18" or so, and at each corner. Every side of your box must have at least three stakes.
Protip: if the ground is really hard, drive a hole ahead of the stick by hammering in a screwdriver.
Step three: get weaving
First weave your biggest branches in and out between the stakes. You can remove any leaves for free compost at this point.
Protip: this is the hardest part, so don’t get discouraged! Here is also where you will find out of the stakes are thick enough or hammered in deep enough. Try not to cry if they fall over. Or break.
Step four: keep weaving
Now you put in the smaller branches. I found that long vine types like ivy and wild rose can be woven in more than one direction, so if you need to fill in some gaps you can get creative.
Protip: tamp down the walls you’ve made every so often do they stay nice and dense. They need to be closely woven enough to hold dirt later.
Step five: smaller, different weaving
By now you have gotten down to the sticks that aren’t quite long enough to go between the stakes. Make them into smaller stakes, ones that don’t go into the ground but nonetheless weave vertically through your box walls. Hey, it’s starting to look more like a box!
Protip: break off the ends of the stakes and your new vertical weave so they don’t have out too much, and WEAR YOUR GLOVES, don’t be an idiot like me and think you’re safe because you don’t have thorns to deal with.
Step six: fill it with dirt.
If you have any budget, use it all here. Get good, organic dirt, get your compost bin empty, and be extra careful taking dirt from elsewhere if you don’t know exactly what has been leaking into it.
Protip: get more dirt than you think you need. Dirt is fluffy. The second you get water on it all the air goes away and you have a three inches deep garden box. In the unlikely event that you get more dirt than you need, use it for your houseplants or porch containers.
And that’s it! Plant what you like! Use the seeds you’ve stolen from other gardens and the insides of your daily fruit! If you’ve bothered your nosy neighbor and they have alerted the HOA or your landlord, take this time to brush up on your various rights. If your neighbor dislikes you because they believe you to be a witch and a lesbian and idk, a long haired hippy or some other deeply outdated derogatory term, get those middle fingers up because you are going to help the bees and they aren’t.
imagine you lived in a village and regularly went fishing in the river, where you would usually catch about 10 fish per trip. one day, i inform you that i actually now own the riverbank, but if you want to fish there, you can work for me as a fisherman, and i’ll pay you for them. so you catch 10 fish and give them to me. i give you a few coins. you take the coins and go to the store, and with them, you can afford to buy 2 fish. see how i ripped you off there? that’s capitalism
It’s not about the productivity. If we worked less, we’d have time to cook our own meals, fix our devices, do DIY projects, grow food, talk to our neighbors, improve our communities, get our stuff from real stores instead of ordering on amazon, maybe even go around and find a small business instead of just going to walmart because it’s easy, walk or bike instead of drive, play in the park instead of collapsing in front of the TV to turn our brains off, look around a public library instead of just buying online, etc, etc, etc
Exhausted people are easy to sell convenience to and easy to isolate. If we had time, we’d realize we don’t need them
Liberalism can’t explain things like why we still work 8 hour days when it’s well-proven that 4 hour days increase both happiness and overall productivity because it can’t recognize the fundamentally adversarial relationship we have with the owning class. The missing piece of the puzzle is that the rich directly benefit from keeping us miserable, and that will continue to be the case as long as they’re rewarded for exploiting us. Reform won’t fix that, taxation won’t fix it, redistribution won’t fix it. Only abolishing centralized ownership of the means of production will
