Another night out with Andrew, guerilla gardening... but...

After all day battling my Environmental Studies paper, it was so nice to get out with Andrew to do some gardening. I put on my sweatshirt, picked up my camera and headed out to my car to drive to Sparrow (a local coffee shop) to pick up Andrew.

We needed to quick go to Meijier (a local department store) to pick up a shovel and a fork since the one that I was using was borrowed from a friend of mine and returned. On our way, we expressed why we guerilla garden. Andrew expressed because he want to brings awareness to people the importances of knowing where our food come from and how they are made from the soil. He wants to protest against the industrial agriculture of our time with this communal gardens that brings so much more both communal and personal experiences. I do guerilla gardening to take back what should have be our public spaces where we can come and go freely from private ownership. I believe that there should be no wasted private spaces. If one's private space is not being utilize fully or utilize at all, I think that the masses should have the right to utilize such would-be-wasted resource for the benefit of the masses. It was a great communication and I am grateful for it.

We got the shovel and fork in the car and parked it by our garden in downtown in a parking lot... some old spot. But I could not believe it: right when we got out the car, a car with a siren light on top of its roof stopped by us. A policeman like, uniformed man rolled down his passenger window and informed us that this is a private lot. He asked us what was our purpose to be here and asked us nicely to leave. We told him we were only taking pictures around here and that we will leave as he wished. He again lets us know that we should leave and take pictures from the side walk, then he left with his vehicle. He was a security guard for the St. Mary Hospital just across the street and we think our guerilla gardening actions in the past had been noticed with the help of surveillance cameras and that the security guard might had been waiting for us...... WE GOT CAUGHT!!!

What a bummer!!! Our 4 rows of potato and 5 circles of pumpkins is in a private land that we were not suppose to be (like we did not know... we were just hoping no one would stop us...). We think we will just have to come later in the night on another night to avoid the security guard. We will not give up!!! We will take back the space and make it public, make it useful, make it available to all people and their creativity.

After the security guard incident, Andrew quick journal the experience outside of the prohibited public parking lot as I act out what I make the security guard to believe as my purpose to be here: taking pictures. Oh... where is the pen that Andrew was writing with... look more carefully... it is on the roof of the car... it was a four seconds exposure shot... so the pen was on the roof of the car at the beginning of the shot and then during the 4 seconds shot, Andrew picked it up to write... pretty neat... i just discovered it.