Fences

I was on my way to get a coffee when I ran into a guy I know who said he saw me quoted in New York Magazine saying that I was surprised the corn hasn’t been vandalized yet. I wonder where they got that quote because I never spoke to anyone at New York Magazine. However, I will admit that it's true I’m pleasantly surprised that the worst thing I’ve found at the plot is a half eaten dominos pizza tossed in among the stalks. Last winter a blogger posted a story about this project and promptly received several negative comments including the ominous threat: “I’m going to let my dog pee on it”.
In Canarsie the garden is actually surrounded by a fence. Fences figure into the colonial history of the area. One translation of Canarsee is actually “the fenced place” And according to the book, The Algonquin Series, Vol 2 (Tooker) – European farmers as early as 1624 started leasing land in the area from the Indians until there were “twelve to twenty cultivated portions all enclosed in fence.” And the 1665 land grant states “a fence shall set at Canarissen for the protection of the Indian cultivation.” Fences were tools of the colonists in the sectioning land into parcels that could be bought and sold and owned. However the Indian concept of land ownership was different from that of the Europeans. An good book on this topic is Changes in the Land: Indians, Colononists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon.
There have been a lot of surprises during this project besides what has or has not been vandalized. I hadn’t counted on stray cats in Canarsie or a summer without rain. And I wonder why the beans and squash are flourishing in Canarsie while they are struggling in Boerum Hill. I’m surprised that the Lenape blue flour corn so short and the Gigi Hill blue flint corn is taller than last year.
But the lack of “vandalism” at the Boerum Hill plot keeps coming up. One person asked me recently how I keep people from taking the corn.
I don’t.