There were gardens
lying dormant, resting in anticipation of the year’s annual vegetables,
gardens with fragrant perennial herbs - a project to raise money for the
food bank, inside the greenhouses were regiment upon regiment of little seedlettes awaiting either planting in the outside gardens, or moving on
to fledgling gardeners (just the previous weekend, several thousand
seedlings had been given out), a worm farm that produces worms (duh) but
more importantly worm castings for use in the gardens or packaged and sold
as another fund raiser, and a system that raises up fish to food-size
(currently up to 1,000 per harvest) and ties in with aquaponic growing
beds.
Bruce spends his
time attending classes and seminars learning new ways to garden and
produce food efficiently and affordably in an urban setting, teaching what
he knows to garden clubs, community groups and school classes from
elementary to college, and in the “spare” time around and in-between all
that, actually tending the food bank gardens or raising money to further
the programs.
There’s no staff. No
help other than occasional volunteers. The man’s a Force, pure and
simple. He quietly does what needs doing, day after day.
Although the
warehouse sits in front of, and overshadows, the projects behind it, the
metal shelves stocked and unstocked with a front end loader run a straight
line from semi truck to shelf to food pantry trucks and back, so what it
provides to a family is also a straight line.
Families needing food
+
canned goods from companies and purchased with donations and raised monies
= food on the table as a gift, a handout in time of need. If the
circumstance that placed a family in the line for food does not get better
or go away, they must return to the beginning of the equation. A not so
subtle reminder that they are still down, still needy.
What happens in
Bruce’s world of living things is circular and very doable for the average
family, even one without a yard - a lot of great edibles can be raised in
containers, and of course, those darn worms need to be contained
regardless or they’ll escape to run amok.
Families needing food +
families learning how to garden/save seeds/preserve + families adding earthworms
to nourish the garden AND dispose of waste food = food on the table as
part of a repeating cycle as old as Nature and that is both renewable and
very, very empowering. Once a family is IN the equation, there is no end
to it, just a lovely cycle of seasons and interconnectedness.
Obviously, there are
some items that cannot be raised up in the average yard, so the Food Bank
warehouse does serve a very important purpose. But when paired with what
Bruce does and teaches, the Food Bank becomes more than somewhere to get
food, it becomes a true place of hope and self-esteem for families who
need their souls nourished sometimes even more than their bodies.
“Give a man a fish,
and he eats for a day. TEACH a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.”
Bruce may not have a
chunk of ground yet with his name on the deed, but his influence is
stamped on every single veggie that a lot of Oklahoma folks pluck from
gardens they tend their own selves with his help and encouragement, and
for that great energy and devotion, I give you Bruce - Homesteader.
Living in town
seems a pretty insurmountable stumbling block to achieving the
Homesteading Dream, but as Phill, Karen and Bruce showed me, it’s just a
small detail to be worked around.
The ability to adapt
and roll with the punches dealt, either by Fate or Mother Nature, and to
not only survive, but thrive in the environment you find yourself in, is a
prime example of the most successful of species, most notably that
tenacious critter -
Homesteaderus
Urbanus.
