[Community_garden] National embarrassment

[Fred Conrad]

An aside:

Sad to say, I'm about to risk making a very bad impression on some British gardeners.

I give community garden tours to people.  I've been doing it for years.  I'm very casual about the whole thing, usually I ask them to pick me up at my house and we hit three or four gardens in the immediate area.  Community organizers who are about to try their hand at community gardens really need to see a few, meet some gardeners, talk about the issues before they get too far along.  I've done tours for community gardeners from other cities and countries who happen to be in town and want to check out Atlanta's gardening scene, some funders, some researchers.  Probably we all have.

Since my car really sucks, I always ask the visitors to drive.  I paid more for my rototiller than I did for my car.  The headliner is gone, and the foamy stuff that it left behind randomly rains down like dandruff onto the passengers.  Two of the door handles are broken off on the outside and two are broken off from the inside.  It smells like someone spilled coffee in it, several times, because they did.  Not the acidic coffee grounds of this list, but the kind mixed with half and half.  When you turn on the vent fan, little bits of dried leaves and acorns blow out.  When you pull away too fast from a stop light the front seats lay down and you speed through the intersection laying on your back looking at the car dandruff instead of traffic.  The back seat is full of straw.  It's not good.

So I was contacted by the Chancellor of Newcastle (and entourage), in northern England, about a tour.  We set it up for this afternoon, and the weather is going to be stunning.  Naturally I assumed they'd have a rental car, or a diplomatic limousine, or something.  Just now they mentioned that they'll be arriving by taxi.  We don't have time to walk to the gardens, so I'm in a very bad spot.  My wife said I can't bring them into the house, either, because it's a wreck, so there's no recovering from the bad car by showing off a nice other thing.

I should have bought the riding sulky for my rototiller.


Fred Conrad
Community Garden Coordinator
Atlanta Community Food Bank
732 Joseph E Lowery Blvd, NW, Atlanta, GA 30318
ph: 678.553.5932 fx: 678.553.5933
fred.conrad at acfb.org    <http://www.acfb.org> 
Our mission is to fight hunger by engaging, educating and empowering our community. 


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20070227/2dcbf131/attachment.html