Growing your own vegetable garden is an inexpensive way to get delicious, organic, ethically farmed, healthy, local food for you and your family as well as help out your community.
Today, Friday, October 16 is World Food Day; “Achieving Food Security in time of Crisis” is the theme for 2009. World Food Day is an initiative organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
"At a time when the global economic crisis dominates the news, the world needs to be reminded that not everyone works in offices and factories. The crisis is stalking the small-scale farms and rural areas of the world, where 70 percent of the world's hungry live and work. With an estimated increase of 105 million hungry people in 2009, there are now 1.02 billion malnourished people in the world, meaning that almost one sixth of all humanity is suffering from hunger.Both public and private investments are needed, more specifically through targeted public investment to encourage and facilitate private investment, especially by farmers themselves. On the occasion of World Food Week and World Food Day 2009, let us reflect on those numbers and the human suffering behind them. Crisis or no crisis, we have the know-how to do something about hunger. We also have the ability to find money to solve problems when we consider them important. Let us work together to make sure hunger is recognized as a critical problem, and solve it. The World Summit on Food Security proposed by FAO for November 2009 could be fundamental for eradicating hunger." http://www.fao.org/getinvolved/worldfoodday/en/
Inexpensive
· The average Canadian family spends 11-17% of their income on food so if you can grow your own vegetables, you could make a significant change in your family’s cash flow. The money you save on growing your own vegetables, you could spend on other energy saving projects or put towards your emergency savings fund (3-12 months of expenses saved for income emergencies). http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/061212/t061212b-eng.htm
There is speculation that the cost of food will go up considerably for the industrialized world just as it has for developing nations. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNUGCu1hx88 If the prices of oil and thus transportation go up, then companies in the food industries will have a harder and harder time making a profit. It is likely that companies will just not be able to ship products, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, to far away places. If you took a look at where your fresh vegetables and fruits came from, you would see that they come from all over the world, thousands of miles away, some items requiring refrigeration for the entire journey. How much of the cost of your food item is for transportation when you to get a pineapple from Hawaii or grapes from Chili?
The average Canadian family used to spend 19% of their family income on food up until the 1950’s. The changes in food transportation made it possible for us to get fresh fruits and vegetables from other countries at a deeply discounted rate and since then, we have gotten used to it. We now complain at the high cost of food, forgetting or not knowing that this adjustment is actually bringing it in line with what is appropriate. We should plan on food costs increasing.
· Reduce your food costs by planting a garden, as an investment of $70 in seed can produce $530 worth of vegetables (National Gardening Association http://www.gardenresearch.com/files/2009-Impact-of-Gardening-in-America-White-Paper.pdf ). This cost of seed can be reduced even further if you practice the method of ‘square foot gardening’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggzGF0TBVsg or even save your own seed. The cost of other things needed for your garden such as dirt, leaves, twigs, compost, etc can be saved from your own yard waste or even acquired from friends and neighbors. You can use very basic tools to do your gardening maintenance such as a shovel, a cup and your hands. Tools needed for short term major projects can be borrowed from family, friends and neighbors or even from a tool lending library; some tools can be rented at a small cost for the hour, day or weekend. Watering your garden can be done with collected rain water or even grey water from your house. Fertilizer can be very inexpensive from the store and you can make your own with compost tea and other homemade recipes.
· You don’t even need a lot of space for growing fruits and vegetables. If you have a south facing area (in the northern hemisphere) you can grow vegetables on a balcony, porch, steps, or even in a window. With a small space, you can grow potatoes in a square foot box or bag http://tipnut.com/grow-potatoes/ , tomatoes hung upside down from buckets, and lettuce in a large pot. Even if you planted 4 lettuce seeds in a large pot and lopped off the leaves leaving an inch, it will re-grow you could have a fresh bunch of lettuce every couple of days all summer.
· Keep in mind that like any activity, there are companies that make fabulous fancy gadgets for those that want to buy them. Companies market all sorts of tools and products that are nice, but unnecessary; you can make a raised bed out of rocks and rubble or beautiful patio stone slabs and corner kits.
Delicious
· I don’t know if it is because we are a northern climate, but when I go to the grocery store, even in the summer, Romaine lettuce is a shade of white to light celery green. When I grow Romaine lettuce in my garden it is dark green, the colour of grass in the shade. It is chock full of dark green nutrients whereas the light coloured stuff is mostly water and fiber. When I compare the taste, the lettuce from my garden tastes like food where the store bought stuff tastes like water with some crunch. I imagine that because the lettuce comes from far away, they cut it before it is really ripe. When I grow lettuce in my garden, I can cut it when it is just sprouting with 2 inch long leaves for delicate baby greens or I can wait until it is bigger and tastes richer. Last year I mixed greens from Romaine and Butter Crunch lettuce with bits of baby beet tops; I added a bit of oil and lemon juice and it was divine.
· When you have a garden, you can pick your vegetables and they can be still warm from the sun, releasing the complex flavours, imagine tomatoes off of your vine. With your own garden you can pick some lettuce, plunge it in some cool water then eat it within minutes or you can store it in your fridge for much longer than the stuff brought to your store in a truck from somewhere. You can have fresh food all summer.
Organic
· When you grow your own vegetables, you don’t have the pressure of making sure every plant delivers a profit. Of course you want to get the most out of your plantings, but the future of you company is not dependent on your harvest. You have the luxury of allowing a few plants being taken by pests or bugs. Because home gardening is so inexpensive, it takes so little of a harvest to break even.
· When you grow your own vegetables, you know what was put on them. When you buy from a store, you must trust that they have not lied about pesticide use or have even made a mistake about labeling their produce correctly.
· When you grow your own vegetables and if you decide that you want to use an insecticide you have the choice of using something that is not harmful to you such as insecticidal soap or even a non-organic insecticide, you can ensure that the person applying it is kept safe. When pesticides are used by companies, you don’t know if corners are being cut for worker safety.
Ethically Farmed
· When you are removed from your food source you have no idea if the food was grown ethically. There are many stories about farmers that are pressured to work for less and less in order to keep their vendor contracts. Farm workers are under pressure to work faster, longer and stronger to keep their job and sufficient wages. At every point that you have a person processing the food, there is an opportunity for that person to cave to profit over ethics. At every point of contact there is the possibility for a person to cut corners to put profit over health. At every transaction there is the possibility for someone to exert power over another for their own benefit.
· When you grow your own food, you are likely not coerced into growing. There is no one there with a machine gun watching you work. You do not get threatened with being fired and the resulting threat of hunger for you and your family. You have the choice to work an 8 hour day or to say, it is sunny, I would rather have a gin and tonic on the deck than weed. You do not have to harvest your veggies to meet a contract deadline, you can harvest when the food is ready.
Healthy
· Obviously food that is organic and fresh is better for you, but also you can be sure that you have not had your spinach grown with black sewer water. You do not need to watch the news for government reports of food contaminated with listeria and salmonella.
· It is healthy for everyone to garden because you are outside communing with nature. Being outside around vegetation is actually healing as it not only neutralizes the bad feelings one is holding and replaces them with good. http://www.realage.com/tips/working-out-a-good-cry
· When children grow up seeing where their food comes from, they develop a healthier relationship to food as an important aspect of their overall health. Food becomes associated with health rather than a consumer product to be indulged in or restrained from.
· Seeing a seed go in the ground and then seeing a plant pop up that can nourish you has a profound effect on your spirituality. When the earth magically provides for you, it gives you a sense of hope, a feeling of abundance, the assurance that with a bit of planning you will always be cared for. Watching the process of vegetables growing is symbolic of resurrection, reincarnation and energy transformation.
· Grow a vegetable garden just for the beauty. When you see a drop of water on a leaf of a zucchini plant, the shine on the inner skin of a red onion, the contrast between the beet top’s green leaf and red veining, the sound of bumble bees caressing a sunflower blossom, the smell of a bush of spearmint, the sound of kids singing “what’s up doc?” as they run through the yard with a fresh carrot, the sound of water pouring from your garden hose, and the feel of gritty wet humus filled dirt. These ancient visions, smells and textures pull at deepest cellular memories and remind us of the promise of life nourishing food.
Local
· Vegetables from your garden are as local as you can get; it is a zero mile diet. You don’t pay a nickel in transportation.
· One advantage of getting your food locally even if you don’t grow it is that you can be more confident that the people who farmed your food have been protected by employment standards of your local governments. If you don’t think employee protection is adequate, as a voting citizen, you have the power to create changes in the employment standards.
Community Health
· During each world war and during the Great Depression, governments had to send food to soldiers and the food delivery system was frequently disrupted resulting in less food for the average citizen. Homeowners were asked to grow their own food to ease pressure off of the major companies so they could focus their effort on getting food to soldiers; they were called Victory Gardens. Homeowners who grew their own food did so to ensure victory and were considered very patriotic.
· In times of peace we still have a reason to have a garden as there are still disruptions in the food delivery system due to natural disasters. When you grow your own food and stock up, you are also in a better position to help others who have lost their food sources. I remember a fellow from New Orleans talking about how he saw the Mormons show up with blankets, canned food and water within hours of Hurricane Katrina doing its damage. The Mormons reached their fellow countrymen in some cases days before their government were able to respond. The Mormons follow a religious guideline to stockpile food to care for their families in tough times or for natural disasters. I am sure everyone who received food, water and blankets from the Mormon community is thankful that they are prepared and generous.
· Not only will you feel confident that you can take care of your family with basic needs, but you may be in the position to help out your community. Feeding your community and teaching them how to produce food will help your neighbors recover from difficulties improving the resilience of your community. Your neighborhood doctor is no good to you if she and her family are starving.
More articles on gardening coming soon; look for subjects such as planning for multigenerational accessible gardens, raised beds, and indoor winter vegetable gardens. Sign up as a ‘follower’ to keep updated. Get green!
Friday, October 16, 2009
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Why Blog? Why not Blog?
I wanted to use the sharing component of the internet not only to share my experiences on my journey into self-sufficiency as part of my work to save humanity and the environment.
I have been using the internet to research different things related to gardening this season and as I signed up for different newsletters the magic of the web pulled me in different directions of knowledge.
I looked up how to build a raised bed for a vegetable garden and found a keyhole raised bed used in developing countries at schools to grow food for students. http://www.cowfiles.com/african-gardens/keyhole-gardens The keyhole garden is a circular raised bed built up of stones or rubble with a pie slice cut out to allow you to get to the centre of the bed to place compost and grey water which then nourishes the garden. I thought about how a raised bed could be built in small suburban yards tended by children and seniors. A keyhole garden could be built near apartment blocks, schools, community centers, jails, hospitals or any communal institution.
One ‘subversive’ magazine http://www.bust.com/ sent me a newsletter about their blog about hearing about a group trying to figure out how to grow food in apartment windows using a suspension system with plastic pop bottles. http://windowfarms.org/ Then there was the group of fellows growing vegetables in the back of a truck. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGGUfYFdFrc All this going on while I am hearing about people living in tent villages because they had lost their jobs and were now poor; I kept thinking about how people in the United States are going to be hungry and how cold they will be this winter.
I looked up how to tell if my potatoes were ready to harvest and found out about chicken coops. The chicken coop designs were cute and compact and then I started researching raising chickens for eggs. http://www.motherearthnews.com/Sustainable-Farming/Raising-Backyard-Chickens.aspx This brought me to the political debate about allowing backyard chickens in my city which then led me to a fellow who introduced me to his chickens. He talked about the right to food as a human right and how it overrides a city bylaw.
I picked up a gardening magazine that a friend got me last winter and in it was an article about the program Plant a Row, Grow a Row, http://www.growarow.org/indexENG.htm in which gardeners plant a row of vegetables specifically for their local food bank. Not only will I go local with my own produce but I can go local with charities.
I am part of a women’s circle in which we meet to discuss the Sacred Feminine. The premise behind the Millionth Circle is that once there are enough groups getting together to work for some sort of betterment of mankind, we will reach Gladwell’s described ‘tipping point’ and there will be a paradigm shift for the better. http://millionthcircle.org/About/vision.html
So the blog is not just a discussion for me about how to plant a garden or how to save money on energy and saving the environment, but for me, the pull is to do this because I feel it is the necessary next step for the betterment of mankind and as a way to save the planet. It is so cliché to say that I want to work toward world peace, but from what I have noticed through the internet, is that I am not the only one working toward world peace, and that I want to be part of the wave of change that is working toward this goal. Although there are still terrible things that are happening in the world, I think that this is the time when we as a global society know a lot about human behaviour, about technological efficiencies.
In Here Comes Everybody, http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/ Clay Shirky says something like:’Love can have a profound effect on a small group of people’ (I am still looking for the exact quote). He talks about how caring family groups can be and when people do get together, there can be a lot of love and a lot of good work brought about. I think that especially with the internet, our world is smaller; we do not have the barriers of geography to see or talk to someone in another continent. We can meet up with people who are similar to and we can form friendships across oceans. We can feel sorrow seeing images of people like us undergoing hardships and know that it could be us and we can actually help them.
I invite you to visit my blog and check out the links to these exciting projects and ideas. I hope that you can make a change today or even just feel like you can do something and feel the hope that things can get better. I invite you to send me stuff you have found or tell me about your projects so we can further inspire people. I think the future is going to be really fun once we clean up and start caring for each other.
Okay, so this blog is really over the top on hope and there is the cynical editor in me that is just shaking my head-get over yourself. But really I am an optimistic person and when I get organized, I can get a whole lot done. Okay, everybody, let’s go.
I wanted to use the sharing component of the internet not only to share my experiences on my journey into self-sufficiency as part of my work to save humanity and the environment.
I have been using the internet to research different things related to gardening this season and as I signed up for different newsletters the magic of the web pulled me in different directions of knowledge.
I looked up how to build a raised bed for a vegetable garden and found a keyhole raised bed used in developing countries at schools to grow food for students. http://www.cowfiles.com/african-gardens/keyhole-gardens The keyhole garden is a circular raised bed built up of stones or rubble with a pie slice cut out to allow you to get to the centre of the bed to place compost and grey water which then nourishes the garden. I thought about how a raised bed could be built in small suburban yards tended by children and seniors. A keyhole garden could be built near apartment blocks, schools, community centers, jails, hospitals or any communal institution.
One ‘subversive’ magazine http://www.bust.com/ sent me a newsletter about their blog about hearing about a group trying to figure out how to grow food in apartment windows using a suspension system with plastic pop bottles. http://windowfarms.org/ Then there was the group of fellows growing vegetables in the back of a truck. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGGUfYFdFrc All this going on while I am hearing about people living in tent villages because they had lost their jobs and were now poor; I kept thinking about how people in the United States are going to be hungry and how cold they will be this winter.
I looked up how to tell if my potatoes were ready to harvest and found out about chicken coops. The chicken coop designs were cute and compact and then I started researching raising chickens for eggs. http://www.motherearthnews.com/Sustainable-Farming/Raising-Backyard-Chickens.aspx This brought me to the political debate about allowing backyard chickens in my city which then led me to a fellow who introduced me to his chickens. He talked about the right to food as a human right and how it overrides a city bylaw.
I picked up a gardening magazine that a friend got me last winter and in it was an article about the program Plant a Row, Grow a Row, http://www.growarow.org/indexENG.htm in which gardeners plant a row of vegetables specifically for their local food bank. Not only will I go local with my own produce but I can go local with charities.
I am part of a women’s circle in which we meet to discuss the Sacred Feminine. The premise behind the Millionth Circle is that once there are enough groups getting together to work for some sort of betterment of mankind, we will reach Gladwell’s described ‘tipping point’ and there will be a paradigm shift for the better. http://millionthcircle.org/About/vision.html
So the blog is not just a discussion for me about how to plant a garden or how to save money on energy and saving the environment, but for me, the pull is to do this because I feel it is the necessary next step for the betterment of mankind and as a way to save the planet. It is so cliché to say that I want to work toward world peace, but from what I have noticed through the internet, is that I am not the only one working toward world peace, and that I want to be part of the wave of change that is working toward this goal. Although there are still terrible things that are happening in the world, I think that this is the time when we as a global society know a lot about human behaviour, about technological efficiencies.
In Here Comes Everybody, http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/ Clay Shirky says something like:’Love can have a profound effect on a small group of people’ (I am still looking for the exact quote). He talks about how caring family groups can be and when people do get together, there can be a lot of love and a lot of good work brought about. I think that especially with the internet, our world is smaller; we do not have the barriers of geography to see or talk to someone in another continent. We can meet up with people who are similar to and we can form friendships across oceans. We can feel sorrow seeing images of people like us undergoing hardships and know that it could be us and we can actually help them.
I invite you to visit my blog and check out the links to these exciting projects and ideas. I hope that you can make a change today or even just feel like you can do something and feel the hope that things can get better. I invite you to send me stuff you have found or tell me about your projects so we can further inspire people. I think the future is going to be really fun once we clean up and start caring for each other.
Okay, so this blog is really over the top on hope and there is the cynical editor in me that is just shaking my head-get over yourself. But really I am an optimistic person and when I get organized, I can get a whole lot done. Okay, everybody, let’s go.
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