With each passing day, it seems the United States of America, “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” is becoming more and more like the Communist Russia I learned about in elementary school where people weren’t allowed to grow their own food unless the State “allowed” it.
In this latest crackdown on citizens simply trying to provide for themselves using the most basic of skills – gardening – the USDA’s Rural Development Agency is forbidding Rosie, an industrious 4-year old girl in South Dakota from using a small, unused area outside her subsidized housing unit to grow green vegetables.
Rosie’s mother, Mary (names changed to protect the child’s identity), is single and severely disabled. She and her daughter live on a fixed income disability payment of $628/month. The garden vegetables growing just outside her backdoor lovingly tended by Rosie provide a fresh and healthy addition to their diet that they could not otherwise easily afford.
Rosie started the garden in May 2013, but now the property management company has ordered the garden be removed this week!
The reason?
The property management company claims that gardening goes against the rules set by the USDA’s Rural Development Agency which forbids residents to have structures of any kind within landscaped areas. It seems to me that the practice of growing vegetables by the most needy in our society would take precedence over landscaping, wouldn’t you agree?
I wonder if the USDA plans to establish “rules” about breathing air in subsidized areas too?
The Federal bureaucracy seems to think that it owns those individuals who receive any sort of government assistance and that their behavior is completely within its jurisdiction to control no matter how ridiculous or blatantly un-American the power-tripping “rules” they decide to put in place may be.
Think this is an isolated case? Â It’s not. Â I write regularly on this blog about these outrageous situations where ordinary citizens are bullied by out of control bureaucrats, the most recent being a Mother in Maine who was harassed and threatened by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for feeding her healthy, robust 3 month old son homemade goat milk formula instead of horribly unhealthy commercial formula from the store laced with rancid vegetable oils and GMOs!
What You Can Do Now to Help Rosie
It is truly unfathomable that our country has degenerated to the point where a person can no longer garden without permission from bureaucratic thugs who get paid with our hard earned tax dollars to think up these rules – Â not laws –Â rules that have never been voted on by the elected representatives of the citizens expected to abide by those rules.
If you recall, this is exactly the sort of authoritarian insanity that started the American Revolutionary War (tea party anyone?).
Tell the USDA where it can put its “rules” against gardening by those living in rural, subsidized areas.
Sample Email to USDA
You can copy/paste the email template below to send directly from your email provider. Template provided courtesy of Kitchen Gardeners International, the source of this story.
To:Â [email protected]
Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject:Â Allow USDA-subsidized housing residents to grow vegetable gardens
Message body:
Dear Director Meeks,
I urge you to make a loud and clear statement to all the property management companies your agency contracts that USDA-subsidized residents have the right to keep their own vegetable gardens provided that these gardens are actively maintained. Vegetable gardens grow healthy and affordable foods as well as a sense of community. Rather than preventing low-income and disabled residents from providing for themselves, we should be doing everything we can to encourage them. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely yours,
(Your name, your town, your state)
Important Updates to This Story
8/27/2013:Â FINAL UPDATEÂ and details on Rosie’s Victory Garden!
8/26/2013:  A detailed update to this story is provided here.
8/25/2013: Â Roger Doiron, Director of Kitchen Gardeners International, has provided more details on this emerging story. The USDA has claimed in email correspondence to Mr. Doiron that it has no written rules preventing Mary and Rosie from having a garden (despite the property management company’s insistence to the contrary). On the other hand, the USDA hasn’t come to Mary and Rosie’s defense either and by allowing the property management company it has a contract with to call the shots and bully Mary and Rosie it is essentially enforcing such a rule no matter what is claimed via email.
Bureaucratic rules are notoriously confusing to understand let alone interpret, but if the USDA stands behind its assertion that there are no “rules” – written OR unwritten – against gardening in subsidized housing, it should stop the property management company under the auspices of the USDA from forcing Mary and Rosie to remove their garden.
The USDA pays most of the rent for Mary and thousands of citizens like her around the United States. Â It should do the right thing and insist that property owners and managers of subsidized housing permit residents to grow their own food in well cared for gardens rather than look the other way when residents are bullied for their efforts at self sufficiency. Â After all, the stated mission of the USDA Rural Development Agency is to “improve the quality of life in rural America”. Gardening surely would be supportive of this important goal.
Source
Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI).  Rosie and Mary’s real names and exact location in South Dakota have not been revealed in order to protect the identity of a minor child.  Please contact KGI Director Roger Doiron, [email protected] if you wish to further verify the validity of this story.
I would think that since the President’s wife is all about eating healthy food, she would be able to step in and encourage all families in subsidized housing to grow small gardens of healthy food.
people come on, this has nothing to with “communism” it has to do with corporatism. That’s who owns this government, not some idealogical zealots.
Look into Monsanto, and there power, this little kids garden isn’t anything, it’s a pimple, look at the corruption. This government is this or that, it’s corrupt, it’s bought, that’s the bottom line.
I live in south Dakota and worked at several apartment areas in town that had disabled or limited income families. Unfortunately many of the property managers would not let you fart without permission. many people wreck it for the few as is the story normally. I would recommend guerilla gardening and container gardening as these would be the hardest for the manager to fight. I would also write letters up the chain of command and see if they owners of the properties would get involved and maybe get equipment ready and area if available to have an apartment community garden area….strength in numbers.
This is what I think is going on… Sun Tzu said (not verbatim obviously) that if you control the food, you control everything. The US government supports companies like monsanto who seek to create seeds that are only good for ONE generation of plants… no more seed saving, have to buy new seeds every year… they’re trying to monopolize the food INDUSTRY.. because here it IS an industry that makes a LOT of money. Raiding organic farms, trying to destroy heritage strains, trying to control everything that people can grow… it is a dire situation that most people don’t realize the severity of.
Maybe people should stop flinging insults at each other and take a look at the bigger picture. This family is not the only one being targeted by regulations, (no matter who is trying to regulate) it is happening all over the country. We should be asking WHY? More, we should be asking WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT… and stand up and do it.
And if you bring non-GMO seeds in from another country they are confiscated when you enter the country. I live in Ukraine and an American friend took some seeds back. She was made to open her case and the seeds taken out when she arrived at the airport in America.
Kind of messed up, and I completely agree that the little girl should be able to grow her veg if there isn’t any health reason (non-food-worthy chemicals, etc) to bar her, but honestly, you should change the title of the story and put your update at the top of the article. The initial assertion has been shown to not be truthful, and it’s shoddy journalism on any account to bury the single paragraph that speaks to that at the absolute end.
It makes perfect sense if you go under the assumption that the government wants people like this family to be dependent on the government. Lord forbid that they should have the initiative to help themselves.
The property management people probably don’t know the difference between real vegetable plant and weeds. To them probably everything that is green and grows something edible, is a waste of time cause you can purchase the same thing in a store. All be it that it was picked way before ripening, and loaded with pesticides and other chemicals.
Wonder what they would do if they came to my place and see my small garden of 85′ x 65′. I grow several rounds of crops every year. Start out with radishes, turnips peas and beets, then corn onions, tomatoes, and sunflowers. Followed by watermelons, cantaloupe and pumpkins (white ones, regular orange ones, and sometimes little baby ornamental ones. Forgot to mention the green beans.
They would really come unglued over the fact that I fertilize with horse and cow manure over the whole garden area and tilled in after sitting over the winter. Also leave space open for chicken manure, but leave it sit for a few months then till it, leave it sit some more and till it again. I guess they would have something against raising my own chickens as well. Probably think that all eggs are fertile, even though there are no roosters in with the hens. Probably also think that roosters are needed for the hens to lay eggs too.
Rambled on long enough but common sense and actual putting book knowledge to use seem to be at a different spectrum from the other.
There could be a number of environmental factors that could reason into gardens not being allowed in this area. For instance soil toxicity and urban pollution.
I’m betting if they had potted vegetable plants on their porch and not on someone else city land no complaints would have been made. Some people are very moody about whats on their land… But a lot of city areas have toxic soil…and this says they live in a subsidized apartment complex, those are usually located in the ‘bad’ parts of cities which are very dirty and polluted…
Though the healthyhomeeconomist asserts she is not the source for this story, the article reads as though she is. The source is actually a Maine resident who sells people gardening plans on the internet. I believe the story is a common type of fraud perpetrated on Facebook and blogs for the purpose of generating valuable marketing and political email lists through the on-line “petition” scheme. Perhaps the gardening guy is trying to generate a list to email his offers to. As I requested of the healthyhomeeconomist, she should make clear she does not know the veracity of this story and she does not know that the photographs are anything other than stock pics. Read the story: it is pregnantly devoid of any verifiable material. What would be the need to “protect” the people? Why not the name of the property management company? The first part of the story makes it seem the government is the bad guy, though Mrs. Obama is a well-known advocate of victory gardening. As a father of 4, I can assure anyone that even the most remarkable 4-year-old is not capable of creating a vegetable garden, let alone the professional-quality floral garden pictured in the piece. I emailed the man the healthyhomeeconomist says was her source and his reply was evasive and incoherent and he claimed to be considering pulling the petition because the property company had “moved” the garden(?!).
Thanks Mark, cooler heads prevail ! As I commented, there was more to this story then big against little, and as your research has shown, it is actually the slimy verses the naïve… The internet is full of opinions of less than knowledgeable people and packed full of scams, in the heat of the moment with the defenseless dangling before our eyes, we tend to react rather then act… So, yet another story that has a community up in arms is seen as bogus… When the truth comes, we will be numb! Thanks again!
I am not a protester, I rarely, if ever, sign petitions, I have never seen a rally change anything but only sway opinion back and further. The only way to change wrongs or correct mistakes is to change it with logic and reasoning, all else is only a unruly gang filled with hate against the hated. So, I don’t fall for scams in general because my rule is if it sounds like a duck…