As anyone who makes and uses their own compost will tell you, the hard part is trying to stop tomatoes and chillies from growing. In less than a week after spreading that lovely, faithfully tended compost over your delicate annual flower seedlings, you'll be picking out newly germinated tomato and chilli plants and cursing yourself for not sorting out your kitchen scraps. The tomatoes and chillies may well be poor quality and not all that edible, but along with zucchini, they're the energiser bunnies of the house garden.
If he's still struggling to get them going, either he's planted varieties that are completely incompatible with the conditions in the garden, or he's stupid enough to not even pick the caterpillars off of the leaves.
Unschoolers invariably think that 'primitive' tribes both extent and dead just let their children run around willi nilly, and the children learn at their own pace and will magically become fully educated and productive members of their tribe. To say that unschoolers are incorrect is like saying that the oceans are a bit wet. In subsistence communities children work bloody hard, often harder than a full adult in a first world country. Certainly they're allowed to play, but as soon as they begin walking they begin learning, because it's quite literally life or death for the entire tribe. If unschoolers were Eskimos they'd end up being pitched headfirst into a breathing hole in the ice.
Pretty much. If a delinquent orange tree is dropping fruit all over the footpath then by all means go snavel them, but if it's a plant that needs to have its fruit physically pulled off, that's just bullshit. In the part of NSW I grew up in, stealing geranium cuttings from other people's front yards was almost a regional sport, with all rules firmly set: you only take one cutting, you never take from a small plant, and you only take from plants that are growing through the fence. Entering into someone's yard was an instant disqualification. But there's a huge difference between knocking off of a small piece of a plant that's the masochistic of the garden world, and stealing food. And even if the owner doesn't give a shit about what you take, you still have to pay at least a token amount of attention to any possibilities that there may be something physically wrong with what you take. There could be pathogens, there could be the residue of the Agent Orange that the elderly gardener refused to turn over to the regulatory organisation because it's the best pesticide that's ever been made. And after all that, I've no doubt whatsoever that Matt isn't a member of the geranium stealing sports club. He's absolutely the type who'd jump the fence because the owner obviously doesn't need all of those fruits and vegetables for themselves, so it's okay to just take what he wants.
