Comments on: Garden as if your life depended on it, because it does

By: Greg Seaman

Greg Seaman — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 16:57:00 +0000

I don’t know how the average family can afford the cost of food without the supplemental help of a garden.

By: Mary Hitzeman

Mary Hitzeman — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 13:59:00 +0000

My friend and I were just talking about this last night. When we were raising our children, you could go to the store each week and know what you would spend for food. At that time my budget was $15.00 for food and it would buy the thing needed. Now you don’t know what you will have to spend from week to week. Hard to have any type of a budget. Not just on food, but on gas, heating, etc.

By: Greg Seaman

Greg Seaman — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 16:27:00 +0000

Great tips! Thanks Heather

By: Heather James

Heather James — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 23:35:00 +0000

Check on the community garden issue where you live. For example, in the city of St Louis, any vacant lot that the city owns (this is entire blocks in the worst areas) can be rented from the city for garden space for $5 every 5 years (this may have gone up in the decade since I used the program, but I expect it’s still a nominal amount of money, even for a poor person. There is also free help available for tools, seeds, and supplies. Vegetable seeds can also be paid for with food stamps.

By: Greg Seaman

Greg Seaman — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 00:10:00 +0000

Agreed!

By: Amanda and Josh Benson

Amanda and Josh Benson — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:04:00 +0000

If you have the space this is great. Community gardens work, but are rather expensive for the people who would benefit the most from them. They are usually filled with folks with income to spare who our doing this as a feel good hobby. What we need are more garden yards instead of grass and more community gardens so the cost can go down.

By: Stefab

Stefab — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 08:54:00 +0000

Did you ever consider creating a forest garden? They are less labour-intensive and more stable to outside shocks stemming from the weather.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFbcn06h8w4&feature=related

By: Greg Seaman

Greg Seaman — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:36:00 +0000

I understand your frustration Jen.
The changing climate is making us all learn ways to adapt, and I am afraid this is the future. We had an unusually wet spring which reduced the fruit set on our trees. However the wet weather was great for the potato crop. I recommend growing potatoes in raised beds since the drainage is better than ground level beds. This can also help with the other crops you mention. I suggest you assess the drainage in your garden as this is easy to remedy with ditches and raised beds. In the future I think we will be seeing more people sing greenhouses to provide a more stable growing environment for vegetable crops.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:03:00 +0000

“there is no replacement for oil that can do all that oil has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it.”

Hemp.

Oil is only ‘cheap’ because it’s subsidized by the tax payers. Move some of those subsidies over to alternatives and sustainables and we might just be able to turn this mess around.

By: amzie

amzie — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:59:53 +0000

gardening helps us to accept and understand the life cycle……what is the force driving the growth ?
flowering……then destroying ???

By: cole891

cole891 — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:33:04 +0000

Awesome man. Loving it.

By: Greg Seaman

Greg Seaman — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 17:42:18 +0000

Thanks Uncle B for sharing your thoughts and the benefit of your experience.
I recently read a little book, The Tenderfoot Trail, about people moving to the Canadian wilderness during the Depression. The gov't gave free land (pre-emptions) to folks who would fence, build a home and work the land. When folks moved up from Vancouver and other cities, they found out the hard way that there was no game to shoot during the long winters. The living was tough.
There are regions in the US and Canada where the growing season is long enough to garden for the table and have foood to store through winter. In our case, as you are correct in suggesting, it took years before we enjoyed real success in gardening. But today there is more access to information, and websites like this one offer people the knowledge and benefit of our experience. I think new gardeners can get good results sooner than in the past.

By: Uncle B

Uncle B — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 17:08:00 +0000

Note also, massive oil consumption coming on-line from China, to accelerate the scarcity of oil, drive oil prices ever-upward. China recognizes the energy problem, and strives for Thorium fueled, plutonium free, benign waste product reactors for electrical generation. Google Tsinghua University, pebble bed, gas reactors, and see for yourself. Google China, CANDU, thorium reactors too! See more! China also is developing CANDU reactors from Canada, run on Thorium, to avoid the humanocidal plutonium, the un-disposable waste products from faulty, American designed, plutonium breeding, high and dangerous waste product producing Uranium fueled GE MK5 types of reactors as found at Fuckoshima.
Ontario, Canada, the McGuinty government, is obsessed with nuclear death, and builds even more Fukushima styled reactors as we speak, all the while, Canadian made thorium fueled, plutonium free, benign waste product reactors are being built in China! World gone mad? Bribes? Favors? Sick politics? Big money influence? Why?
To save my very soul, in these times of astoundingly high prices, inflation, depreciation of the dollar, (gasoline this moment, here in my home-town, $1.32 a liter!) I have gardened, brewed, pressure canned, dried, sauerkraut-ed, home-brewed, made wine, even shopped hard and preserved the rare anomaly from the Super Markets. (meat, fish, can be pressure canned safely!)
Gardening is a skill. It takes years of study, good weather, good water, much planning, just to make it work! Folks, get started now, expect meaningful gardens after 5 to 10 years of long term reading, study, note making, understanding, composting, and hard work! It does not happen over-night. Beer-brewing, the same, takes practice to get it to reliably reproduce good home-brew, 4 or 5 batches with study, notes, maybe, best, right from grain, but is most work-intensive, requires much practice, study, thought, preparation. Sauerkrauting is easy! Not too much salt! you’ll ruin it! Weigh things, dammit! and cabbages grow like weeds, drying food for winter use is an art, requires a great deal of understanding, lots of ascorbic acid, and patience! Even “scalloped potatoes” can be done, using ascorbic acid, they store well for years. Pickling is fairly straight-forward, takes some work, yields high rewards, Dill are the easiest, sweet and sour take a little more work, some planning, Pickled peppers my favorite, good cheap way to store a bumper crop of peppers. Buy new bottles, keep them for years, new lid inserts only expenditure – this is a good deal! My bottles, some of them, over 25 years old, still serving. Beer bottles the same – get a set, clean them out every time, they last a long, long time! Screw type caps, not so good!
Compost! Look up humanure! Leave it to municipal governments to adopt, and they must, soon, for our top-soil’s sake, to save our lakes from blue-green algae. Vote this way!
As the Coca-Cola Corpocracy fails before our very eyes, as the Asian empire rises like fast yeast in the East, as the oil dries up, the truth about Uranium fueled nuclear power is revealed, just as the planned obsolescence design into American cars eventually caught up, left Detroit City a Third World ruins, we face a changing world! be ready! Even some folks now perfecting off-grid lives! They hide among us here on the web, seeking out information, gleaning technologies that might serve.
The outstanding factor, that scares me the most, America, is at the moment, the largest debtor nation in the history of the world! Never before seen!, And, mostly owed to Japan, China! On top of that, Obama and Stevie Geithner went begging at China’s door last year, for even more, and were turned down! Will this crash the American dollar? Will this mean astounding austerity in the U.S.? Will a republican back-lash to Obama bring in hard times, tight money, draconian governmental measures?
All tragic, all possible! Beware of astounding deflation of the dollar, unfair inflation in the stores! garden your ass off, and learn all the survival trades you can! Do not think you can go to the wilds of Canada and survive there with a gun and a fishing rod! That is a Hollywood propagandists colored view of the reality of the Canadian North-lands! Think the truth! Think – 40 degrees, frozen lakes, all winter, 6 or more months of it, and sparse if any wildlife left! Check out everything you thought you could believe, on the web, on factual sites before you trust anything you “Think” you know! most your information is skillfully constructed false-hoods, sold to you by the greatest propaganda machine ever known! Beware.

By: TGriz

TGriz — Mon, 30 May 2011 13:16:37 +0000

Excellent article, and I agree with your choice of the "BIG THREE" — Peak oil, climate change and economic collapse. These looming eventualities are ominous! A great famine is coming. Famines have occurred throughout the ages, but never on the order of billions of people. The so-called, "Green Revolution," powered by hydrocarbons, is unsustainable long term, and as such, will not be sustained (duh). The GR took human populations from roughly 3 to the present 7B people. This will reverse when the next and greatest famine kicks in. Plant your gardens, store away, buy a gun and bullets, secure a source of water (hand pump well?), and so on. It won't be pretty, but forewarned is forearmed.

By: C Brown Photographer

C Brown Photographer — Tue, 10 May 2011 04:35:51 +0000

Great article. I've never had much of a green thumb, but I might have to give growing my own food another shot.