When I first got my garden plot through Columbia Gardeners, it looked abandoned. The fence was made of different sized pieces zip-tied together, some of the beds had been ripped up and dragged off, and there were rusty metal scraps of braces and more fencing everywhere. The previous gardener had a casual disregard for things like whether something was biodegradable or not, and plastic plant tags were scattered and half-buried everywhere. The ground, regardless of bed layout, was a ragged mat of nettle, crabgrass, and dead bits of annual flower corpses. The list of horrors goes on, but needless to say, it was not uplifting.
