Urban Guerrilla Season 3: Donut's Garden Raid
Text by Pan Xingci, Gorilla Green Guerrilla
For our children, for our children, what is the value of the land? Whose hands are stained with the blood of the land? This is a war, yet there is a sweet hope in our eyes.
About a week before the guerrilla action, everyone met and chose a site. The hillside plot next to Nangang MRT Station became our target because of its beautiful surroundings, good subject matter, and high degree of seclusion. Let's just treat it as a practice ground for guerrilla gardening!
This is a piece of state-owned land that was "baptized" by the city government and the neighborhood warden to coincide with the Flora Expo. The warden, eager to do a good job of cleaning up the environment, forcibly cleared a vegetable plot that a farmer had planted on this land and asked the city government to replace it with "park landscaping," thus shaping the current amusing landscape: inside the state-owned land boundary, a lifeless little Flora Expo vs. on the neighboring private land, a vibrant little Veggie Expo. Seeing such a stark contrast, do city residents give it any thought?
Come, come, let's take a look at the Veggie Expo we can create on a low budget! No reservation tickets needed.
The original appearance of the guerrilla base
Action - Shaping the Beauty of the Countryside in the City
On the day of the guerrilla action, the wind was strong. The gorillas went to the flower market early in the morning to buy materials (potting soil, vegetable seedlings), and unexpectedly discovered that the flower market's recycling bins could yield free bundles of straw, withered bouquets, begonia potted plants, and more, so we also tried our best to make good use of these discarded resources.
After arriving at the MRT station, we carried the soybean meal collected from Yonghe Soy Milk, fruit peels from juice shops, coffee grounds from coffee shops, and so on, all up the hill. The exercise-deprived gorillas were all exhausted. This guerrilla action also drew many new friends recruited online, and even the Community Building Society sent a little representative! The view on the hillside was superb. Some gorillas laid out picnic mats and just lay on the wooden platform, enjoying being surrounded by bamboo leaves dancing gracefully and watching the white clouds drift lazily overhead. Taking this opportunity, we experienced the beautiful new countryside within urban Taipei.
In this fake park that "no one knows, no one is aware of," the city government had newly planted frangipani (Plumeria), and a ring of pampered lily turf (Zephyranthes candida) beneath the trees was already on the verge of death in this barren wild ground. But did everyone know? A single tablespoon of healthy fertile soil contains more microorganisms than all the people on Earth combined, and their benefits in promoting nutrient cycling are endless!
From Permaculture we learned an ecological farming method - hügelkultur-style sheet mulching - to improve the soil, with multi-layered planting that imitates how nature works. This method can recreate the state of leaf litter covering the soil surface, preventing water evaporation and providing insulation, while after decomposition it also becomes a nutrient-rich humus layer. The raw kitchen scraps wrapped underneath decompose and also become natural fertilizer for the plants.
This base's layout was very much like a donut, so we called it the Donut Guerrilla, and it was even a multi-layered vegetable-flavored tiramisu donut. When discussing the plant arrangement, someone blurted out, "We can divide it into four zones: vegetables, flowers, vegetables, flowers," making everyone laugh so hard they could not close their mouths. The colorful raw kitchen scraps scattered in the donut were as romantic as Daiyu burying flowers, and the dense, fine texture of the soybean meal also amazed us. Unfortunately, before we could savor how long it had been since we last stepped on soft soil, after hanging up the gorilla sign, we quickly made our getaway.
We hope the water spinach, garden cosmos, sweet potato leaves, lemon balm, mint, rosemary, lavender, green beans, and Thai basil we planted can all grow up healthily in this biodiverse big family.
Photo silhouettes before and after the guerrilla action
Everyone worked together to complete the vegetable-flavored donut
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