Re: Garden Insurance in California

**A*@aol.com**

Am I a fogey? Or did I miss the words "please" or "thank you" in any of 
SoleilPaz's missives? Maybe I don't read too well anymore and need bi-focals.

Community gardening also means  that you open up the telephone book, look up 
the California State Dept of Insurance, get put on hold, call again until you 
get someone who wants to help you. You walk to a local insurance company, 
explain what you want to do and see if they don't laugh in your face. You 
write letters, make friends of your neighbors. Write more letters. Again, 
Soleil, did you read the stuff in this listserve's archives, the letters and 
organizational information on the ACGA web page? Did you check out every link?
Did you bother to do a web search? 

More suggestions:
You go to your neighbors, the ones who live near the garden and ask them if 
community gardening is something they would be interested in doing, be 
willing to throw a coupla dollars at, work an afternoon a week in. You have 
to go to schools, you have to go to the local church, you have to talk to 
everybody.  Before you ask somebody for their land, how about cleaning up and 
beautifying a school or church garden, that little dried up patch of green in 
front of the library or police station? Is there an old person's home near 
where you are? Working on that out of the goodness of your heart gives you a 
little street credibility. 

Letter writing. There are public libraries in California, Soleil, with books 
on grant writing letter writing and, of course, manners. 

Lesson 1 in grant writing: When you ask people for help, you say please, and 
when they try to help you, you say thank you.

Happy gardening,

Adam

Somehow a shovel comes from someplace, a bag of sand, a few tools from 
somebody's attic, people start showing up. But you first have to set a good 
example, break your butt, convince them that community gardening is something 
that is worth doing.  

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