Benefits of Temporary Fence Panels

This week we finished and put up the second and third temporary fence panel we have built for our house in a mobile home development in Desert Hot Springs, California. When we bought this 1963 single-wide mobile home for $7,500 in December 2004, it was just to be a convenient second home for us to be close to our then most major business consulting client. However, the landlord turned it into our primary focus by trespassing on our land every week and taking out plants and trees. Anyone reading our website knows the edible landscaping prong of the three goals of this organization was the beginning of our whole work. At the time we were the typical “limousine liberals” who do this kind of charity work. We had decided to devote the next part of our middle age to demonstrating how poor people could improve their lives by growing their own food. Along that path, we realized poor people would not plant and nurture perennial food plants as we were advocating if they could not be assured they would be on the land when harvest came. That was what moved us to work on ultra low cost housing in the first place, and that led to renewable energy. It was definitely not OK for someone else to decide where, when, and how we were going to grow plants and trees. Therefore, we had to decide either to give up and move, or fight for the rights of poor people. What has happened because we took the latter path is we turned ourselves into real poor people showing how to develop ultra-low cost housing with edible landscaping and renewable energy. It became a full-time job to not only do the remodeling, gardening, and development work to demonstrate the principles of Home-Grown Food Network in this house, but also to fight in court the attempts of the landlord to scare us out of doing it. We have done that full-time since May 1, 2006. One of the most interesting and truly wonderful of many such things we have seen along the way is how many times, to paraphrase some author unknown to me, when you become truly committed to a goal, the Universe rises up to meet you. For three years we had been going along with our business life, acquiring real estate for the charity with our incomes, and not doing much else to develop demonstrations of how the principles of Home-Grown Food Network work in practice. Every time I passed one of our vacant lots I felt like a failure, even though I knew “someday” we would actually start some demonstrations. Then when we were literally forced to stop doing anything else, the demonstrations actually started happening, and they have become better and easier every day. Now our full-time efforts have actually started to develop visible and edible fruit. Besides that, what seemed like roadblocks have turned into stepping stones toward better results than we planned. One example of that is the temporary fence panels we have been building. We didn't want to make permanent fences because we have a rental agreement for the land the house is on that says anything attached to the land becomes property of the landlord. It seemed like an extra job to make the fence panels temporary. However, because we wanted to make them temporary so we could keep them, we started to think of them as art. This has resulted in beautiful panels we would not have spent so much time on if we had thought of them as just part of a fence.The first panel was the wine bottle-metal bed frame-silk flower one I wrote about in two blogs. (I promised to write about that one again when I finished it, but I haven't done that yet. I will, I promise again, later.) It's so beautiful, and now we have 12 of 23 bottles we need for the next one accumulated from our son's Internet cafẻ. Then driving around in Santa Monica one day I saw some plastic Lexis dealer advertising figures thrown away in an alley, and I thought, those “people” could become a fence panel. It was really hard getting them here because I had only cars to use. That weekend I brought the 28 French windows in a car, which I have also already written about, was the same time I found the stick-figure advertising people, and at first I tried to bring them back along with the windows. That was just impossible. The “people” are six feet tall and almost two feet wide each, three of them, two women and a man. Getting them through car windows and wedged in diagonally so they didn't stick out too much to drive was difficult anyway. Fitting in 28 windows as well I finally gave up on, and left the “people” in our son's back yard in Santa Monica. Two weeks ago I got back again and picked them up I had at first planned to paint them with that spray medium that makes coffee tables and such look like gray stone. When I looked at the directions on that, it was for interiors only, and besides, it was expensive and didn't seem to cover much, and I had both sides of some 24 square feet of surface to coat with something weatherproof. I thought then that some kind of plastic paint plus polyurethane to protect it would do, but when I read the directions for poly it said it was for wood. The only thing I could find that seemed in any way likely to protect those plastic people outside was a plastic Rustoleum spray paint with a plastic patio chair on the can, plus a lacquer Rustoleum spray that said for “wood, metal and more” in the directions. So for $15 I got three cans of that, two different shades of dark red. I also started with an all-purpose exterior stain we already had, in barn red, which put enough color on the people that all the spray paint and lacquer had to do is fill in We had the worst wind ever here many days I wanted to start, so I did only the stain with a roller and brush and let both sides dry. The wind was sure good for drying, although it kept blowing them all over. I waited a few extra days until the wind died down (thank goodness, it drives me crazy) to do the spraying. Finally that was done and dry, and Peter attached it to a redwood fence panel that was here when we bought the house. Then he put rocks in front of and behind the panel to hold it up. It was so beautiful. Then I went to Home Depot to buy corrugated iron panels to put in between all the ones we build. Art is a little much, one panel after another, all different, so I had realized some plain panels would be good to rest the eyes. While I was looking for corrugated iron, I saw some 18” by 10 foot roofing panels with ruffled edges made out of galvanized metal that will be great for the titles of these art panels to be written on in permanent black marker They will also fill in some of the gaps in the panels. That will be good since the reason we are doing the fence panels now is to assure our privacy. Our landlord cut down the Park oleanders in front of our house to four feet high while leaving everyone else's eight or ten feet high. It was obvious he was doing it to snoop on us. Since we now have litigation on file pointing that out and told the manager we would ask for an injunction if he ever again cut oleanders in front of our house lower than the lowest ones in front of anyone else's, he started cutting everyone else's down! Amazing that he would cut off his oleander nose to spite his face. So it is a race to get our six-foot fence up before they again cut down the oleanders. The unplanned result is we have a far more beautiful edge of our land than the oleanders ever were anyway, and it's not poison. The Universe rose up to meet us! June Blogs This week we finished and put up the second and third temporary fence panel we have built for our house in a mobile home development in Desert Hot Springs, California. When we bought this 1963 single-wide mobile home for $7,500 in December 2004, it was just to be a convenient second home for us to be close to our then most major business consulting client. However, the landlord turned it into our primary focus by trespassing on our land every week and taking out plants and trees. Anyone reading our website knows the edible landscaping prong of the three goals of this organization was the beginning of our whole work. At the time we were the typical “limousine liberals” who do this kind of charity work. We had decided to devote the next part of our middle age to demonstrating how poor people could improve their lives by growing their own food. Along that path, we realized poor people would not plant and nurture perennial food plants as we were advocating if they could not be assured they would be on the land when harvest came. That was what moved us to work on ultra low cost housing in the first place, and that led to renewable energy. It was definitely not OK for someone else to decide where, when, and how we were going to grow plants and trees. Therefore, we had to decide either to give up and move, or fight for the rights of poor people. What has happened because we took the latter path is we turned ourselves into real poor people showing how to develop ultra-low cost housing with edible landscaping and renewable energy. It became a full-time job to not only do the remodeling, gardening, and development work to demonstrate the principles of Home-Grown Food Network in this house, but also to fight in court the attempts of the landlord to scare us out of doing it. We have done that full-time since May 1, 2006. One of the most interesting and truly wonderful of many such things we have seen along the way is how many times, to paraphrase some author unknown to me, when you become truly committed to a goal, the Universe rises up to meet you. For three years we had been going along with our business life, acquiring real estate for the charity with our incomes, and not doing much else to develop demonstrations of how the principles of Home-Grown Food Network work in practice. Every time I passed one of our vacant lots I felt like a failure, even though I knew “someday” we would actually start some demonstrations. Then when we were literally forced to stop doing anything else, the demonstrations actually started happening, and they have become better and easier every day. Now our full-time efforts have actually started to develop visible and edible fruit. Besides that, what seemed like roadblocks have turned into stepping stones toward better results than we planned. One example of that is the temporary fence panels we have been building. We didn't want to make permanent fences because we have a rental agreement for the land the house is on that says anything attached to the land becomes property of the landlord. It seemed like an extra job to make the fence panels temporary. However, because we wanted to make them temporary so we could keep them, we started to think of them as art. This has resulted in beautiful panels we would not have spent so much time on if we had thought of them as just part of a fence.The first panel was the wine bottle-metal bed frame-silk flower one I wrote about in two blogs. (I promised to write about that one again when I finished it, but I haven't done that yet. I will, I promise again, later.) It's so beautiful, and now we have 12 of 23 bottles we need for the next one accumulated from our son's Internet cafẻ. Then driving around in Santa Monica one day I saw some plastic Lexis dealer advertising figures thrown away in an alley, and I thought, those “people” could become a fence panel. It was really hard getting them here because I had only cars to use. That weekend I brought the 28 French windows in a car, which I have also already written about, was the same time I found the stick-figure advertising people, and at first I tried to bring them back along with the windows. That was just impossible. The “people” are six feet tall and almost two feet wide each, three of them, two women and a man. Getting them through car windows and wedged in diagonally so they didn't stick out too much to drive was difficult anyway. Fitting in 28 windows as well I finally gave up on, and left the “people” in our son's back yard in Santa Monica. Two weeks ago I got back again and picked them up I had at first planned to paint them with that spray medium that makes coffee tables and such look like gray stone. When I looked at the directions on that, it was for interiors only, and besides, it was expensive and didn't seem to cover much, and I had both sides of some 24 square feet of surface to coat with something weatherproof. I thought then that some kind of plastic paint plus polyurethane to protect it would do, but when I read the directions for poly it said it was for wood. The only thing I could find that seemed in any way likely to protect those plastic people outside was a plastic Rustoleum spray paint with a plastic patio chair on the can, plus a lacquer Rustoleum spray that said for “wood, metal and more” in the directions. So for $15 I got three cans of that, two different shades of dark red. I also started with an all-purpose exterior stain we already had, in barn red, which put enough color on the people that all the spray paint and lacquer had to do is fill in We had the worst wind ever here many days I wanted to start, so I did only the stain with a roller and brush and let both sides dry. The wind was sure good for drying, although it kept blowing them all over. I waited a few extra days until the wind died down (thank goodness, it drives me crazy) to do the spraying. Finally that was done and dry, and Peter attached it to a redwood fence panel that was here when we bought the house. Then he put rocks in front of and behind the panel to hold it up. It was so beautiful. Then I went to Home Depot to buy corrugated iron panels to put in between all the ones we build. Art is a little much, one panel after another, all different, so I had realized some plain panels would be good to rest the eyes. While I was looking for corrugated iron, I saw some 18” by 10 foot roofing panels with ruffled edges made out of galvanized metal that will be great for the titles of these art panels to be written on in permanent black marker They will also fill in some of the gaps in the panels. That will be good since the reason we are doing the fence panels now is to assure our privacy. Our landlord cut down the Park oleanders in front of our house to four feet high while leaving everyone else's eight or ten feet high. It was obvious he was doing it to snoop on us. Since we now have litigation on file pointing that out and told the manager we would ask for an injunction if he ever again cut oleanders in front of our house lower than the lowest ones in front of anyone else's, he started cutting everyone else's down! Amazing that he would cut off his oleander nose to spite his face. So it is a race to get our six-foot fence up before they again cut down the oleanders. The unplanned result is we have a far more beautiful edge of our land than the oleanders ever were anyway, and it's not poison. The Universe rose up to meet us! Easy, Free, Perennial Desert Tomatoes (and People) in Summer June 22, 2008 Brenda Barnes, President, Home Grown Food Network, Inc. According to the calendar, yesterday was the first day of Summer. On a news show I heard them say don't tell that to people in Southern California, who've been sweltering through a heat wave for two weeks. Here inland in Southern California, it's worse. We put a weather box on our website so you could see what the climate is where we are. This is real desert, above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 C) three months or more per year. We always hope summer won't start until late May and will end before late September, and we plan on traveling to someplace cooler during the summer. This year, as last, we had such plans but after I filed a paper saying we would be gone from June until September, the landlord set hearings for that time. They try everything, but so far, it's been over two years of truly vicious illegal and frivolous bad faith tactics, and we're still here. The latest ploy is really interesting. In the Mobilehome Residency Law in California there is a section that says for recurrent or continuing violations of rules or law in a mobilehome park, the landlord can get an injunction against the tenant. Then there is the regular eviction section, apparently for worse cases, since the whole eviction section starts with findings about how important it is to protect mobilehome park tenants against wrongful eviction or other interference with tenants' rights, since in addition to the needs of other tenants, mobilehome park tenants tend to be seniors and poor, which we are, and the costs of moving mobilehomes are substantial. First they tried to get an injunction against us, which of course would have required proof we were violating a reasonable rule at the time of the hearing. We weren't, but there is another section that allows the tenant to win no matter what, so we made a motion under that section, and that has prevented them from getting an injunction for a year. Now in May they served 60 days' notice under the eviction section, which not only would require proving we were violating a reasonable rule at the time of the hearing or maybe the time of the notice, I'm not sure which, but anyway, which we're not and we weren't, regardless. Whichever it is, it also would require proof of violations and proper notices of those violations some time in the past. And anyway, as they know because it has already happened, there is another section that allows the tenant to win no matter what, so we will make a motion under that section again, that will prevent them from evicting us for a year or more, and even after that, they would have to prove cause for eviction they could never prove. Trying to evict us is like losing in the semi-finals of a tournament but then showing up to play in the finals. I'll recommend that to the Lakers if they have the same bad luck next year. No reason to be second; just insist on the game you already lost entitling you to be first. We have never received a notice that even pretended to follow the law, which requires dates, times, witnesses and specific facts proving violations of a reasonable rule or law. The eviction notice itself had none of those either, as to what we were supposedly doing wrong at that time. Even if any of the notices did comply with the law, the eviction notice goes on to say that we cannot cure our violations, whatever they were, and we will be required to move our mobilehome from the park when we are evicted, pay the rent for the time the eviction notice was in effect, and pay the landlord's attorney's fees and costs for the eviction. None of this is legal. Regardless, all of this would be pretty intimidating to a non-lawyer, but I retired to start Home Grown Food Network after 20 years of practicing law in California, which I did after graduating in the top 10% from a Top Ten at the time law school, UCLA. I also received the National Law Week award for the very highest grades in the class in the final year, in a class that included Alex Kozinski, later the youngest person ever appointed as a justice to a federal Court of Appeals, and many other really top lawyers. By contrast, no one the landlord has hired could qualify to get near UCLA School of Law except by buying tickets for some event. Therefore, we have to stay here again this summer, and this time all summer, since every time we leave something awful happens to the house. As much as we've worked on it now, and as much as I love it, I couldn't bear that again, so we've agreed one of us will always be here to take pictures and record what happens on an audio recorder too. One time last Fall all the items in our front porch area the landlord had complained about--and no others--were cut up, broken, smashed, and thrown around the yard when we came home from being away for a few days. Of course we could not prove who did it, but we did put up a security camera that would show who did if they did it again, and sent them a letter saying we would. What a shock: since then all the trespasses have been in another location of the yard, they claimed the camera violated a rule, and after we chained all the other gates they served us a notice claiming that violated a rule. When they set hearings, while I am gone they trespass and take pictures they then attach to their next notice. One day while I was gone to one of their hearings, the manager threatened to knock Peter's teeth out, and stood five feet away from him with a chain saw going, when Peter told him to stop cutting down the oleanders or he would call the police. Peter recorded it, but of course they didn't know that, so they sent us a letter claiming Peter had threatened the manager and thereby violated a rule. We replied saying we have the recording, so when our depositions were taken, their lawyers claimed—with no authority, of course, these people do not specialize in legal research—that it is illegal to record what we see and hear on our own property. The beat goes on. The good part of that is having to be here to see how the garden makes it. I noticed this morning when I went out to sing to them that the tomatoes, of which I'm attaching a picture I took about 10 AM, suddenly don't have any more flowers. We got the metal mesh shade cloth back up, and it has stayed up, on the east side of the garden that gets the afternoon sun, but now, with triple-digit heat for over two weeks, it looks like all the garden will stop having tomatoes for awhile. We're still going to put another layer of the metal mesh over both sides, and see if that helps. Some flowers might come if we can get the soil temperature down enough. Peter figured out how to makes poles for that from illegally-dumped tree trimmings he finds in the desert. It works so much better than the flimsy metal poles that were all we could afford to buy last year, which could not support the weight of vines in the back or withstand the wind we get all over the property. We have to use metal mesh because two of the rules we apparently were accused of violating are one about hanging bathing suits or clothes outside to dry and a nonexistent one about having combustible things in a yard. We have taken pictures all along of the two other mobilehome owners here who seriously garden having shade cloths over their plants, of course. This is, after all, the desert. Anyone who wants much of anything except trees to last through the summer in a garden is going to have to shade it. However, last year when we used purchased 40% shade cloth over the arbors in the back (South) yard, we got a notice about violation of some rule, and I assume it is one of those two. So we're using metal mesh. I've never seen anyone swimming in that or drying any on a clothesline, and we have proof from the manufacturer that it is not combustible. Someday maybe we'll see if the landlord claims to have proof otherwise. There are about 20 ripe and green tomatoes still on the vines, but as long as it took for any to ripen last year, which was over three months of our wonderful Fall and Winter seasons, we might be without tomatoes from our vines for months. Therefore, I'm going to start some of our seeds I dried in newspapers from tomatoes we ate, in pots in the greenhouse and move them around to see how they do best, given the conditions. The greenhouse is still a dream, just the gazebo frame on the East side of the house. However, we got a little money in from a refund from my first appeal against the landlord. So I'm going to use that to get the greenhouse-grade plastic and shade cloth to put over the frame, and the misting system to keep it cool, and a faucet divider to send water to the mister. We need the divider to be able to control the mister at the same time we have another control of the soaker hose to the jacaranda trees we're letting grow along the boundary of the property where the managers keep cutting the oleanders so they can spy on us. What a bizarre way to have to garden and live! I would never have believed it if we had not lived it ourselves and documented it day and night for over two years. We thought we were going to demonstrate edible landscape gardening, how to make an ultra low cost house large, comfortable, and gracious, and how to use passive and active renewable energy here. It turns out we had to demonstrate a lot more. Like how people have to grow to fight a fight about it for unknown reasons, too. We'll see how we and the garden grow through the summer here in the desert, my friends. I'm sure it will be interesting. Not what we had planned. Something better. Summer Desert Food Gardening June 30, 2008 Brenda Barnes, President, Home Grown Food Network, Inc. This morning I went out to sing to the tomatoes, peppers, herbs, grapes, and mango trees. I took new pictures I'm attaching. There are three mango trees growing now, so I'll research how big they grow, and whether we need two to pollinate. I'm sure the space where they're growing is too small for three trees, so I'll transplant one or two into pots we have in front of the house. We can't plant trees without permission from the owner of the land, our landlord, according to the Mobilehome Residency Law in California. That is so ridiculous I can't bear it, since our lawsuit against the landlord details the many ways they discriminate against us while letting other tenants do the same things, so they should not be allowed to keep us from planting trees without a good reason they use against everyone else. However, luckily for us trees grow here without our planting them. Seeds blow in the wind, start from falling fruits on other trees, and are deposited by birds. If I don't want what grows I pull it up. If I do or might want it, I let it grow. Either way, I did not plant it. In the case of the mango trees, those seeds are too big to come from wind or birds, and there aren't any mango trees growing around here that could have dropped fruit, so I don't know where they came from. I'd think they were there already and our watering other things made them germinate. Interesting. The double shading Peter put up to cool the soil where the tomatoes are growing has not resulted in any improvement I can see yet. The soil feels cool to the touch, but no flowers have come out since I noticed the ones that were there had all dropped. This is the time of year nurseries here are selling little tomato seedlings in pots, just as they do everywhere, but anyone who knows what happens here knows those tomatoes are not going to bear fruit this summer unless the area where they are grown is well shaded. In our case, I think we waited too long to get the shade up, so we will probably have a few months without any tomatoes. I also turned the soaker hoses up a tiny bit, so now the water is barely on instead of almost not on, the way it was. Therefore, there is dampness on the surface of the soil, so I'll just crush some more overripe tomatoes this week the way I did last year at this time and see if little seedlings grow in two weeks the way they did then. I also have some dried seeds on newspapers from eating tomatoes that grew, so I'll plant a few of those in different areas and experiment with what works. The sweet potato vines that came back after dying in the winter are so amazing shading our house and the back yard. Even though we were not here last year when it was as hot as it's been the past three weeks, averaging over 110 degree highs, we can feel how much more comfortable it is in the house than it was last year. That's when it was even cooler outside than it has been lately. I took pictures of four doves that were sitting on fences in the shade. I hope they can be seen. It made me feel so good to be able to provide a habitat for them, too. I know they eat our grapes, but thank goodness I do not need those grapes to survive, so I'd rather have the doves than the grapes. Last year one day I saw quail mothers with rows of their tiny babies running along behind them leaving the tomato patch. At the time we didn't have any tomatoes yet and I didn't know what they were doing there, but I think they eat insects. In any event, the tomatoes grew like crazy, so the quail did not hurt them, apparently, and may have helped them. Peter bought PVC pipes today to build an arbor over the grapes that are growing all over one of our parking areas. We need to get them up so we can put bird netting around them. It also will increase the shade they provide to put them overhead on an arbor. We found an amazing source of free bird netting. I had been researching that a few weeks ago. The best solution I found to birds getting killed by being caught in commercial bird netting is buying tulle in a fabric store. I was going to do that when I got the money, when amazingly enough yesterday I was walking in the fruit tree section at Home Depot and stepped on some white fabric. I picked it up, and it looked like tulle. Then we searched around to see where it came from. Peter discovered it is used to divide layers of landscaping stone, so they don't scratch. Once a layer of stones is sold, the tulle is thrown away to expose the next layer. So that is free tulle! Incredible how abundantly the earth provides for us. We are building an eight-feet high wall three feet inside our East yard, to enclose a courtyard. It's interesting how well the herbs in the planting area on the other side of that have already started to grow, when the wall is just two feet high now. The gale-force winds we have here come from the other side (the West), so that wall is protecting the plants from them. It also is reflecting heat onto them whereas they were in the shade of the landlord's oleanders three feet away before, so nothing grew very well there, since I plant only food plants and food plants for the most part need at least some sun. We're using mostly rammed earth to build the wall, in the mode suggested for Super Adobe by the late architect Ghamal Khalili at Cal Earth in Hesperia, but he used it for dome houses made by packing dampened soil mixed with 5% Portland concrete into plastic tubes. We made reusable forms out of laminated flooring and sprayed it with cooking spray so the earth-concrete would not stick as it dried. It's cost $7 now for one bag of concrete, and that should be enough to get the ten-feet long wall up to about three feet high, so we think it will cost $20 for the whole wall. It's sure great we have a concrete mixer to do it. One of the funniest things that has happened in our two-year long lawsuit against the landlord is in March we got a letter calling that concrete mixer “clutter.” Interesting life, eh? Only someone intent on claiming that they were violating rules in order to discriminate against people could have come up with that one. Have a good week.