In a garden filled with flowers and beds bursting with vegetables and herbs, nearly a dozen teenagers are harvesting vegetables for the weekend's farmers market.
Roshawn Little is going into her junior year at Eastern, and has been working in this garden for three years now. "I didn't really like bugs or dirt," Little says, thinking back to when she got started. "Well, I still don't really like bugs, but I like the dirt," she laughs. She gathers a handful of greens, yanks from the stem and pulls up a baseball-sized beet.
During the summer, Little gets paid to work Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. with City Blossoms, a nonprofit that brings community gardens to schools, community centers and other places where kids gather in urban areas.
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Baltimore City is littered with abandoned urban gardens. They are now overgrown with weeds and are depositories for trash and drug paraphernalia. It all sounds good, but the realization is these people aren't interested in doing any kind of work whatsoever.
ReplyDeleteThat's so sad. I wish there was an ongoing program, an organization that would keep inner city residents of any age involved in literally ground roots involvement in their own sustenance.
ReplyDeleteThere is NO work ethic, in a population who doesn't fill their belly with the fruits of their own labor.
When the Zombie Apocalypse is upon us, they're dead, unable to survive.
Just goes to show you that the old civil war vets were right when they said, "Freeing them will only mean, we got to take care of them forever, they can't do for themselves".
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